The Celebration - Theater

Show & Culture

With La Fête, a play inspired by a drama that took place in Belgium a few years ago, Anne-Cécile Vandalem marks the beginning of her new cycle of creations, which will start from the complexity of reality to speak about our collective wounds. The play is set after the death of a Belgian-Senegalese student, which occurred during an initiation ritual organised by the fictional student society TussenOns. The ensuing trial revealed the mechanisms protecting the guilty young men, all of whom came from powerful families. Two years later, a journalist organises a meeting between the family of two of those convicted and the father of the deceased student, in the convicts’ house, a symbolic and oppressive place where the walls bear the memory of family secrets. La Fête is a play in two layers: it fictionalises a meeting that reality prevented from taking place, in a theatrical and cinematic closed-door setting that reveals the links – inherited from colonialism – between economic and political elites, while also unveiling the here and now of theatre and its artifices, where the actors involved in the creative process reproduce on stage the patterns they wish to overcome.