Let’s Say It’s Us brings together four women, 25-50 years old, coming from different European countries. These women are art workers active across different disciplines (writing, making, performing, dance, dramaturgy, film, music, artivism) but also researchers, mothers, activists, immigrants, sign language interpreters, and many more. Together, they attempt to construct live on stage their own subjectivities and, through that, put together the pieces for an unorthodox narrative of the female experience based on fragments from various defining events in their life.
The project comes in dialogue with Veronica Raimo’s autofiction novel Lost on Me and the title of the book’s Greek translation (“Let’s say it’s me”) that points directly to the fictional construction of the self that Raimo is interested in. Starting from excerpts of the book (which is always with them on stage and they often read from), the performers reconstruct fragments of their own selves. In this way, they gradually construct a fragmented, multi-voiced feminist narrative of what it means to grow up as a woman in Europe. Following Raimo’s aesthetics, this narrative avoids victimization, melancholy, or romanticization of the past. Instead, as Raimo does, it uses humor, clichés, disarming honesty, and often painful confessions to create a story that is neither predictable nor “politically correct” as a female narrative. It thus redefines the boundaries of feminist expression.
The work experiments with how the literary genre of autofiction might look like on stage. Moving between the autobiographies of the performers and fiction, it invites the four women to rewrite and narrate their own stories on stage.
Deze productie komt tot stand met de steun van de Tax Shelter maatregel van de Belgische federale overheid en Beside Tax shelter en van de Vlaamse Overheid.