Your latest creation draws as much on fable as on all forms of fiction. What is it about?
I wanted to address religion and explore the emergence of a new form of belief. What might we be able to write, to invent together? In the face of rising fascism, La Parabole du Seum is conceived as an attempt at survival. One that takes root on the margins, in lives that resist the norm. The play is grounded in a place I know intimately, since I was born and still live there: Seine-Saint-Denis. It’s a highly stigmatised département, onto which violence and prejudice are projected. In this fable, I invite people who are marginalised because of their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, body, or health to come together and fight against fascism and “ecophagy”—the destruction, the devouring of our ecosystem. These are people who are denied the right to form a community, while at the same time being isolated from the rest of society. The title La Parabole du Seum closely echoes, phonetically, a book that fascinated me: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. In religious tradition, a parable is a short story used to reflect on a subject. “Seum,” a word from Arabic, means venom. It evokes anger and bitterness. That is precisely the substance our play explores. On stage, poetic texts, performances, and the construction of sound and visual imagery intertwine. As in my previous work, I seek to create a conflagration between the play and the audience in order to generate empathy and awareness, but also laughter and dreams. I hope to create, on stage, a form of community that is more complex and more valued than in our society.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler is indeed one of your sources of inspiration for this play.
I discovered this African American science fiction writer in 2018 during a programme on Afrofeminist cyberculture at La Gaîté Lyrique. The composer and performer Mélissa Laveaux had been invited to play a few pieces, and she suggested that I read excerpts from Octavia E. Butler there. At first, I thought this kind of literature wasn’t for me. But very quickly, I was hooked. When you constantly hear that the end of the world is near, you begin to realise that science fiction isn’t so far removed from reality. In Parable of the Sower, published in 1993, Octavia E. Butler sets her story in 2024, in the midst of a collapsing American society, undermined by climate change and growing inequalities. We follow Lauren, a 15-year-old preacher’s daughter. In search of a place of refuge, she sets out across the United States and meets many survivors like herself, with whom she tries to build a community, writing down its principles, which becomes a kind of new Bible. What I take from this book is the idea of constant movement, of forging a shared path driven by the necessity to survive. Discovering Octavia E. Butler’s work was a real turning point for me. It led me to explore more broadly science fiction written by Black American women and trans authors, such as N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, and Rivers Solomon, as well as Caribbean writers like Ketty Steward, Michael Roch, and Isis Labeau-Caberia. I was also drawn to the work of Meg Elison, who, in her short stories, plays with fatphobia and science fiction. These artists inspired me to engage with this language both poetically and politically. Science fiction doesn’t offer solutions, but it allows us to endure pain differently, to dream in new ways. Among my other sources of inspiration are Saint Seiya and The Wiz, the musical adaptation of The Wizard of Oz with an all-Black cast, as well as a recent favourite at the crossroads of philosophy and humour: Le Goût du Seum by Chams Zarrouk.
Who are the performers you have brought together to form this community?
The one thing they have in common is to have had to develop survival strategies for many different reasons: because they are queer, trans, fat, because they have overcome illness, or experienced exile… Not all of them come from the performing arts world, and that was precisely what mattered to me: bringing together individuals who carry enough anger, enough reasons to resist, and who deserve a place on stage. Together, we are creating a shared language. The writing of the piece started with them: I passed on my tools, and they set their boundaries. In this shared space, the material of the performance took shape, at the intersection of theatre and performance art.
You continue your work as a director in close collaboration with Céline Champinot.
We have been working together since Où la chèvre est attachée il faut qu’elle broute, created in 2018. With La Parabole du Seum, it is the second time we have conceived a play where I am not on stage. I am a performer. Céline is both a stagecraft artisan and an actress and writer who knows how to translate my needs with the artistic and technical teams. Together, we explore the hybrid form I am trying to build between theatre and performance, because these two practices do not obey the same rules. Performance unfolds in a singular time: it is never performed in exactly the same way twice. It adapts to what happens on stage. Theatre, on the other hand, is based on repetition. At first glance, these two forms are not meant to be combined. Working with Céline is like having a permanent theorist in the rehearsal room, constantly questioning what we are doing. At what point are we in theatre? When do we shift into performance, and why?
La Parabole du Seum will be performed in the Cloître des Célestins. This choice is not incidental.
I needed to present this piece in a place close to religion and connected to the stars. The Cloître des Célestins felt like an obvious choice for several reasons. First, there is a personal attachment: I have been coming to the Festival d’Avignon since I was 18. In this cloister, I have seen several works that deeply marked me. I am thinking of L’histoire de Ronald, le clown de McDonald’s by Rodrigo García, Un peu de tendresse bordel de merde ! by Dave St-Pierre, or Au-delà by DeLaVallet Bidiefono. These three performances had a very strong impact on me. Performing in this place has always been a dream for me. This space is charged with religion, memory, and theatre. That is what makes the experience truly powerful for me.
Interview conducted by Vanessa ASSE in March 2026