By ‘Funmi Adewole Elliott
When Alesandra Seutin told me she was making Ceci n’est pas noire: Act 2, I was delighted. I had been the dramaturg on the original Ceci n’est pas noire in 2013, in which she explored her Africanness and confronted society’s perceptions of what a Brown woman should be. Now, as the daughter of a white Belgian father and a Black South African mother, she turns in Act 2 to her white Belgian ancestry. A dramaturg acts as a thinking partner and outside eye for the artist and creative team. Working on this piece, I have been drawn to the power of personal history to open up wider social and political questions. As the feminist saying goes, the personal is political. Stories of growing up, of searching for purpose, of travel and return, of confronting the past and taking up space in the present, are human stories, and through them we find routes into wider social histories, and metaphors that illuminate political issues and social realities. In Alesandra’s story, I see histories collide within a single family, and a single body. Our aim has not been to demonstrate fusion, but to create an image of how living requires synthesis, with movement, music, sound and design resonating and carrying meaning together.
As dramaturgs usually do, I contributed to the research for the piece and worked with Alesandra and the creative team to gather shared reference points from history and popular culture. But this has also been a physical dramaturgy, which has meant dancing in the space and working with Alesandra on modes and methods for investigating how the body can perform a transnational social reality which is nevertheless rooted in specific places and cultures. Verena Rizzo, a multi-instrumentalist, shares the stage with Alesandra, who was emphatic that she should not be seen as an accompanist but a performer in her own right. Part of the dramaturgy has been watching Verena's own persona emerge. For me, this has been a process of deep listening: to the proposals of Gerardo Salinas, dramaturg at KVS; to the conversations between the musician, the sound designer, music dramaturg, rehearsal associates and production team. We bounce off each other's ideas well, and Alesandra holds the artistic direction firmly and generously. That has been a real joy.
Alesandra is a dancer and choreographer, but she works across disciplines: she trained in visual art and has performed as a singer so her storytelling takes a multi-layered form. Besides, personal history, Belgian popular culture, (I discovered, for one, that songs I had heard for years were written by Jacques Brel.), Belgian surrealism, is a fertile soil. I found it has some differences from its French counterpart. It engages with the everyday and the domestic and does so in political ways. The women surrealists, Rachel Baes and Jane Graverol among them, particularly caught my attention. The title of the production itself riffs on one of Belgian surrealism's most famous works, René Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe: a painting of a pipe that insists it is not a pipe, reminding us that an image is never simply the thing it shows.
Alesandra loves to converse with her audience. In the first show she played a guessing game: she placed a card on her forehead bearing a word (God, the Queen, Beyoncé) and asked the audience questions they could only answer with yes or no. Then came the question "Am I Black?", and the audience shouted back their answers. This time she has created a ‘concert balcony’, from which she addresses the audience through a series of transformations, musical genres and poetry, with the kinds of chants you hear at concerts: Can you hear me, Belgium?! The ‘concert balcony’ teems with lines with double meaning, catchy tunes, movements to move you, vocals that make for easy and uneasy listening. Behind the balcony, the floor is marked out to suggest multi-dimensional spaces. These markings emerged from an improvisation method Alesandra uses with her dance practice. Much of our discussion in the rehearsal room has been about how the images, symbols, memories and histories held in that floor can be brought into performance. Through dance, Alesandra shifts between personas, from a shimmering pop princess to an unsavoury, predatory figure, from different eras, moving between childhood and her present as a woman in her forties. Photographs of her family, her mother and father appear in the scenography, alongside echoes of iconic music. I have been intrigued by the tension between the balcony and the floor behind it. It can be read as a meeting place between the seen and the unseen, but there are other layers to it. I envisage an immersive experience offering various ways for the audience to connect. At a time when there are wars, social unrest and neo-colonial oppression in many parts of the world, I believe we need to remember what we share: a common, deeply human desire for a good and meaningful life. There is a need to reflect on what living together peacefully and equitably truly asks of us. Ceci n’est pas noire: Act 2 works as Magritte’s painting does. You see the work of a Brown woman, and you come to understand that the world cannot so easily be divided into black and white.