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A taxpayer-funded French theater production featuring obese performers eating and vomiting on stage while shouting political slogans has been touring major cultural venues across France.
The performance, titled “La Parabole du seum” (“The Parable of Resentment”), is the latest work from Rébecca Chaillon, a self-described “Afro-feminist and queer performer” who has made a career of transforming every fashionable progressive grievance into theatrical spectacle, according to Causeur.
The production depicts what Chaillon frames as resistance by “several fat people” occupying a supermarket, intended as a symbol of capitalism. The on-stage rebellion consists primarily of performers eating large quantities of food, then vomiting while shouting slogans against capitalist, patriarchal, and racist society. Overhead screens show close-ups of the performers chewing kebabs and swallowing then regurgitating multicolored gelatin cakes.
Chaillon, who insists on reminding audiences at every opportunity that she is Black, lesbian, and obese, describes herself as a “food performer.” The stated goal of this assemblage is to spark revolt against the coming fascism, as promotional materials promise.
From Avignon to Public Theaters
The performance premiered at the Avignon Festival, a premier showcase for officially sanctioned progressive art in France. Marketing materials advertised not only “engagement on the front lines of struggles against discrimination” and “narratives of fatphobic, queerphobic, racist, Islamophobic, transphobic, sexist and sexual violence,” but also promised “scenes of a sexual nature” to draw audiences.
Even sympathetic critics at left-wing newspaper Libération acknowledged that “the text is not always mastered,” though they claimed audiences still clearly perceived “the anger against exclusionary policies and classist, contradictory demands for thinness.”
A Pattern of Subsidized Mediocrity
This is not Chaillon’s first venture into what Causeur characterizes as taxpayer-funded theatrical absurdity. Several months ago, she performed “La Gouineraie” with her partner Sandra Calderan at Lyon’s fifth edition of “Festiv.iel,” a production that claimed to “deconstruct, dissect, and analyze what it means to ‘make family'” by “remixing examples of traditional, white, heterosexual and patriarchal families in a joyful and generous scenic bazaar.”
Edwy Plenel, founder of the left-wing outlet Mediapart, conducted a fawning interview with Chaillon about that work, which trafficked in all the fashionable deconstructionist, decolonialist, and antiracist themes that dominate subsidized theater and elite educational institutions like Sciences Po.
The Broader Crisis in Arts Funding
According to Causeur, Chaillon represents a broader phenomenon afflicting Western cultural institutions: performers with minimal talent who have mastered the art of extracting public money by wrapping themselves in every available progressive dogma. The magazine observes that such artists have understood how to live off a society now subject to the very progressive orthodoxies that constitute their stock in trade and the sole substance of their purported artistic statements.
After runs in Avignon, Marseille, and Lyon, the Public Theater of Montreuil is scheduled to host Chaillon and her troupe next, ensuring that French taxpayers will continue funding what critics describe as the systematic destruction of genuine artistic standards in the name of ideological conformity.
With information from Causeur
