Minorities, Algers, Theatre & Devendra Banhart

This wednesday's session began with an intervention of Pap Ndiaye, about what means the concept of minorities in France and elsewhere. He notably highlighted how a minority could be, in terms of population, superior to its oppressors, while being discriminated. That immediately made me think about the situation in Bahrein, where the royal family and government (the political power) are from the sunniite confession, while most of the bahrainis are chiite, and suffer from a lack of representation in the country.

He notably expressed as well how the black people in France can be discriminated, depending on their level of success or fame :  he underlined for instance that « Lilian Thuram, a french soccer superstar, suffered an identity's control in a train station by a policeman who didn't recognize him at first » and that « for a brief second, he was brought back to his black colour (normally cancelled by his fame), whicj is something experimented on a daily basis by french black people, or others discriminated minorities ».

This example reminded me a scene from « La Bataille d'Algers », the breathtaking movie we saw the day before realized by the Italian Gillo Pontecorvo. There's a moment when three women of the FLN try to reach the other side of the city to put bombs in several places of the European quarters of the city. But to succeed, they have to get through a security's control by the french policemen without being suspected. The three women opted to change the way they look to embrace the policemen's representations about how must look like a french woman : the dress, the hair, the accent, the body language. After the Thuram anecdot, I felt like it was the perfect mirror of these three women.

During the afternoon, we had the pleasure to work with Guila Clara Kessous, who showed us the necessity to deal the past through culture, with the example of theatre. She prepared several exercices of improvisation which were supposed to reveal us the deep link between the idea of Master & Slave, and how the power can be reversed with these two (with no slave, a master loses his power, which is not the the case in a contrary scenario, which means that the « real » power belongs to the slave). We also had the opportunity to study the existing differences between being a director and an actor, and what feelings could bring each of these roles (uneasiness, discomfort, power, control, manipulation). Again, the interaction and the collaboration were something we really have to work on during the exercizes. We ended with some groups trying to make a theatre scene with a few sentences such as « No », « Hi », « Don't You Dare ? » or « Stop », which revealed how each kind of speech could represent a symbol of authority, vulnerability or decision. And I almost forgot to mention that we had some good fun while working on our respectives body languages as well, and trying to analyze what means to shake hands in different kinds of situations (« who's the leader ? Who's dominated?). Same thing when we all tried to appropriate the movements of the fellows to our own way of expressing ourselves : meaningful and FUN !

Speaking of fun, to finish, you know that one of my post wouldn't be a real post without a Devendra Banhart mention. Totally random? Not completely : while dancing on this video, you can also try to analyze in this video who are the leaders, and who are the followers.

*Trying desperately to justify this, hope you'll buy this*

*With the video, this post might look as big as Kelsey & Faheem ones*

Matthieu Barbarin