Fantastic Afro-feminisms

Rébecca Chaillon is an actress, author, and director. With a highly personal approach to writing, whose themes are at once intimate, political, and universal, she has created works taking various forms, including: L’Estomac dans la peau (2011), a solo show about bulimia; Où la chèvre est attachée, il faut qu’elle broute (2018), an athletic and artistic show about soccer; Sa bouche ne connaît pas de dimanche (2019), a bloody fable created with Pierre Guillois; and, more recently, Plutôt vomir que faillir (2022), co-produced with the Centre dramatique national in Besançon, which invited audience members aged 12 and up to perform about adolescence and food. In 2021, she created Carte noire nommée désir, during which the stage becomes by turns a floor in a long-term care facility, a pottery studio, an opera stage, and a dinner party table. Chaillon’s literary work is published in theatrical editions by L’Arche.

Founded in 2006, her company Dans le ventre seeks to be a platform for exploring feminine identities and the relationship to the body and society. Chaillon further honed her approach, which mixes debate and intervention theatre with her own notions of cultural action, after meeting Amandine Gay in 2016 while talking part in the documentary Speak Up, featuring a group of Afro-descendant women reflecting on their position in France.

Amandine works in creation and advocacy. She has been a director/producer (Ouvrir La Voix, 2017; Une Histoire à Soi, 2021), an author (Une Poupée en Chocolat, 2021), and an activist (creation of Adoptee Month in 2018), and defines herself as a political author with a fluid writing style. She considers the reappropriation of narrative an act of emancipation. In 2022, she moved back to Montreal as a permanent resident, and founded an entirely Black production company, Caïssa Productions.

Marilou Craft works in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyaang (Montreal) as a word, performance, and undisciplinary artist. Her creative texts have been produced in writing, on stage, and on the air, alone and accompanied. She is also a translator, a member of the Estuaire poetry journal editorial board, and a playwright associated with the Centre des auteurs dramatiques (CEAD). Her various activities embody her practice of the art of relationships, and probe the boundaries between the intimate and the political.