Regarde maman, je danse

A Formica table and two chairs, the simple and intimate space of a corner of the stage transformed into a minimalist kitchen... The ideally simple setting chosen by director Frank Van Laecke to bring us the confidences of an extraordinary woman, actress Vanessa Van Durme. Dressed in a pink silk dressing gown and barefoot, she welcomes us from the stage to tell us her story, that of the first transsexual person in the city of Ghent. The epic journey of a reinvented Madonna and the many obstacles of a road to the cross, ultimately leading to the liberation of a trapped soul who knew she could exist only in a woman’s body. With this monologue, in which she speaks with astonishing frankness about her gender transition, she hopes to break down the audience’s prejudices and show them that people “who are different” are also... people. If theatre lives through the tension between the act of concealing and the act of revealing, Regarde maman, je danse is the sublimation of both. Slowly but resolutely, a transsexual woman sheds sixty years of her life, until she reveals the depths of her soul to us. The encounter is a genuine confrontation. The arrows she shoots hit their mark. The monologue is a long, captivating fado about an individual’s struggle to find happiness, quite simply. -Frank Van Laecke