The Party - Theatre

Show & Culture

With La Fête, a play inspired by a tragedy that took place in Belgium a few years ago, Anne-Cécile Vandalem marks the beginning of her new creative cycle, which will draw on the complexity of reality to speak about our collective wounds. The play takes place after the death of a Belgian-Senegalese student during an initiation ritual held by the fictional student society TussenOns. The ensuing trial revealed the mechanisms used to protect the young men responsible, all of whom came from powerful families. Two years later, a journalist organizes a meeting between the family of two of the convicted men and the father of the deceased student, in the convicted men’s house, a symbolic and oppressive place where the walls bear the memory of family secrets. La Fête is a play in two layers: it fictionalizes a meeting that reality prevented from taking place, in a theatrical and cinematic closed-door setting that reveals the ties— inherited from colonialism—between economic and political elites, while also unveiling the here and now of theatre and its artifices, where the actors involved in the creative process reproduce on stage the patterns they seek to overcome.