An Uncurated World

Résidence de création à la Friche la Belle de Mai du 14 mars au 11 avril 2022.

“An Uncurated World” (working title) is a play about two women who used to be in a toxic and abusive relationship. This play is not a dialogue. The two characters address the audience, and never address each other. They each tell a story, but not always their own. One of them is an amalgamation of two other characters, and we never know when she is which. Does it matter? Would it change how we think of her/them? Would that make us more or less sympathetic? Who do we trust? Are these two women reliable narrators if both of them contradict each other sometimes? Who is telling the truth? Does it matter? More accurately perhaps, this is not an investigation around the reliability of narrators as much as it is one around the reliability of memory. It is memory that makes them honest liars. We experience an event. When we remember it, we conjure the memory of the event. The second time we remember it, it would be the memory of the memory of the event, and so on, until facts give way to impressions, and truth becomes what fits in the narrative. But these characters never ask us to trust them, they might not even be sure if they are asking the audience for anything, except maybe to listen. This play is a queer story, both in content and structure. It refuses linearity, it dismantles expectations, and challenges the heteropatriachal definitions of intimate partner violence. Michelle Tea, in her book “Against Memoir” writes: “To love queers was to love damage. […] For a time, it was not possible to have queer love that was not in some way damaged or defined by damage sustained, even as it desperately fought through that damage.” This might be a play that attempts to fight through the damage, or a play that tells the story of a few moments of queer love, and questions what to name the moments in between.

Dans le cadre du programme NAFAS, 100 résidences d’artistes libanais en France, de l’Institut français.
Avec le soutien de l’Institut Français à Paris en partenariat avec la Région Sud.