Photo: YouTube screenshots.
France: a show horribly promotes anti-white racism!
The Festival d'Avignon, or Avignon Festival, is an annual arts festival held in the French city of Avignon every summer in July in the courtyard of the Palais des Papes as well as in other locations of the city. Founded in 1947 by Jean Vilar, it is the oldest existent festival in France.
"Carte noire nommée désir" (Black card named desire), the show by Afro-feminist performer and queer activist Rébecca Chaillon, is one shocking scene after another.
First of all, here's how the Festival d'Avignon presents the play on its official website: "At the crossroads between fantasy and cabaret, a chaotic show written for eight black artists. A fierce polemic which lays waste to our dominant preconceptions and gives way to a joyous and militant expression. [...] Between boisterous dances, aerial stunts, and frenetic twerk sessions, Montreuil-born director, author, performer, and black afro-activist Rébecca Chaillon has chosen a wildly different register to guarantee we lose our bearings: baroque humour and flamboyant reimagining, with, above all, the importance of sisterhood.
That's the theory. And in real life? Even before the show starts, the audience is immersed in a racist, anti-white atmosphere: black or transgender Afro-descendant female spectators are invited by the theatre usherette to sit in comfortable armchairs (where refreshments are brought to them) while the rest of the audience takes their seats in the usual seats! Imagine for a moment the opposite... the whites at the front and the blacks relegated to the back...
Then the performance begins with - among other things - a new idea from the 'artistic group': a twist on the game Questions pour un champion. The aim was to get the audience to guess the names of famous black women, terms related to whiteness and other racialist obsessions. For example: the actresses take the spectators' personal belongings (bags, headgear, sunglasses, etc.) to make them guess the word "colonisation". A charming programme.
But the worst is yet to come: the play takes a truly obscene and atrocious turn when a nurse impales white dolls representing French babies on a stake! What a terrible image!
Following this scandal, we quote the reaction of Amine El Khatmi, essayist and co-founder of the Printemps républicain, who rightly wonders about the extent of the scandal "if a white actor did the same thing with dolls representing black babies".
He concludes: "Defending freedom of artistic creation, of course, but once again, how can we fail to see that some people allow themselves to do what is formally forbidden to others. Especially when we are told from morning till night and from night till morning that anti-white racism does not exist!