Coolly, without a word, the scene speaks to the disproportionate number of Black people in menial jobs in France. Chaillon, a bold performer and director who has been at the helm of her own company, Dans le Ventre, since 2006, excels at showing before telling. A castmate ultimately pulls her from the floor, and slowly washes the white powder off her body. Then the other women gather around her to braid oversized ropes into her hair — an evocative variation on a Black hair salon.
The scenes that follow are often humorous and surreal. Chaillon reads from classified ads written by white men looking for Black women. Makeda Monnet, a trained soprano, trills her way through a song about coffee — a product often produced in colonized countries — on a table engulfed in white foam, before being covered in a cloud of cocoa powder.
On the night I attended, however, the game of charades steered clear of its most controversial element. While the performers had audience members guess “Black Sea,” “Josephine Baker” or the film “12 Years a Slave,” the game didn’t include “colonization,” and no bags or coats were taken. While that word was intentionally removed from one Avignon performance to protect the cast, a spokeswoman for Dans Le Ventre said that its absence in Paris that night was random; charade rounds are sometimes skipped over when the game runs too long.
What remained that night was a deeply felt production, interspersed with skits and monologues that walk a fine line between true accounts of pain and quasi-performance poetry. On that day, the story of the absent Siby was delivered by special guest Alice Diop, the filmmaker behind the award-winning “Saint Omer,” who sat on the couches in the back with other Black women.
At the very end, the audience was left with an indelible tableau: Chaillon, naked, her heavy braids attached to a tangle of ropes above, as the other women sat at her feet — all assembled like roots in a tree of life. That any actor would be fearful of joining them onstage in “Carte Noire” only proves Chaillon’s point: For Black women, even an act of community is political.
Carte Noire Named Desire
Odéon–Théâtre de l’Europe through Dec. 17; theatre-odeon.eu
