Rodeo

A year and a half after the first lockdown, in January 2022, I fell ill during the fifth wave of Covid. The symptoms persisted: nausea, headaches, exhaustion, memory problems, brain fog. People were talking about long Covid. I experience it not as an inevitable fate of which I am one of the isolated victims, but rather as the memory of a forgotten collective trauma: lockdown, the curtailment of freedoms, isolation, the weakening of our immune defences—which we believe we are saving by implementing protective measures—and the stifling of the bodies and movements of the Yellow Vests.

Drawing on this experience, which has become my daily reality, the Rodéo team and I are working on inflammation and, above all, on the conditions and effects of the conflagration. What causes it, and what creates the conditions for its emergence? What remains of it, and what can these remnants – the smoke, the mist – teach us about what is not merely a fleeting accident but the creation of a new realm of experience that we are too quick to ‘appease’, in other words, to stifle?

We connect the intimate body to the social body and the earthly body. In Villeurbanne, where I grew up in the 1980s, we explore the history of the Olivier-de-Serres neighbourhood, known by its residents as ‘the misty medina’, where, as early as the late 1960s, the practices of car stunts and car burning are said to have originated. Beneath the heavy imagery of ‘urban violence’ widely circulated in the 1980s, we attempt to trace both the construction of the image and the trampled-upon stories of those stigmatised as arsonists. In Brussels, where I now live, we walk through the Sonian Forest and, beneath the apparent beauty of the vegetation—which, in the midst of the city, allows us to breathe—we observe a forest ecosystem subjected to drought and urban pressure.

Together with Camille Louis, the project’s author and playwright, we write from fragments and states of mind, turning mental fog into a method and an aesthetic. We proceed through partial excavations: stories, memories and stifled archives that surface without fully reassembling themselves. In Rodéo, there is therefore neither revelation nor resolution: fragments of text, sound and images compose a scenic landscape traversed by three performers who construct a strange concert of memory.

Mise en scène Léa Drouet
Interprétation Juliette Chmielarz, Léa Drouet, Eli Mathieu-Bustos
Textes, dramaturgie Camille Louis
Scénographie, costumes Carolin Gieszner (touche—touche)
Réalisation costumes Ateliers du Théâtre de Liège
Création sonore Elg
Lumières Léonard Cornevin
Collaboration à la chorégraphie Manon Santkin
Régie générale Ferri Van Overstraeten
Production, diffusion, communication  AMA brussels - Babacar Ba, Clara Schmitt, Emi Parot, France Morin, Noémie Van Cauwelaert
Production déléguée Vaisseau asbl
Coproduction Théâtre de Liège, le Varia, Centre des Arts scéniques, les Halles de Schaerbeek, les SUBS, BUDA, Festival d’Automne, Maillon-Théâtre de Strasbourg, scène européenne, la Coop asbl et Shelter Prod.
Avec l’aide de La Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, Service Général de la Création Artistique – Direction du Théâtre, Wallonie-Bruxelles International, Wallonie-Bruxelles Théâtre / Danse
Avec le soutien de taxshelter.be, ING et du tax shelter du gouvernement fédéral belge
En partenariat avec le Centre des Arts scéniques
Résidences BUDA, Les SUBS, la Bellone,Théâtre de Liège, le Varia
Un projet coproduit par la plateforme Prospero New European Wave (Prospero NEW), cofinancé par le programme Creative Europe de l’Union européenne.