PUBLIC DISCUSSION IN ENGLISH

Heterosexuality, Monique Wittig points out, is a political regime and an ideology that structures our imaginations. This means that all art is a priori straight, and that any form of theater, as long as it does not reverse thought on itself, is necessarily straight. But does that mean that we, lesbian actors, authors, dramaturges, and directors, have always done straight theater until today? Without realizing it? What would a lesbian theater be? What would be its forms? Its stories? Its languages? Its relationships to bodies and between bodies? And which bodies anyway?

Based on stage exercises, theoretical readings and explorations of the intimate, we are launching a research organized around two main axes: constituting a corpus and questioning the gaze. We start from a reflection on intersectionality to explore our own memories, conduct interviews with lesbians and immerse ourselves in historical archives. These materials are necessary for us to nourish our imaginations, because lesbian experiences are largely invisible, including to us, and lesbian theater does not yet exist, at least not in a project which, like ours, combines stage practice and critical thinking. The interviews will result in publications in collaboration with UCLouvain. The violent gaze, at times objectifying or discriminating, is constitutive of the lesbian experience in our society, and it largely determines the relationship that each person develops with their own body. To question it and transform it, we want to collaborate with a choreographer, a costume designer and a lighting designer and imagine emancipatory theatrical forms for both the actors and the spectators.