Red is the color of… Switzerland or love? When a queer and intercultural duo found themselves facing cishetero patriarchal traditions in the office of a civil servant, the answers were not straight forward. This performance explores social codes, clichés and symbols of weddings, while shaking them up and reinventing them.

Red is the color of… ? is the theatrical presentation of several workshops; a honeymoon in the Brazilian Amazon, a Wedding March in Belém, and the Wedding Cake at the Belluard Bollwerk festival. This play is in between theater and autofictional performance. The two artists invite you to an on-stage experience presented as a big revolutionary wedding.
This 5th ceremony will focus on their courthouse wedding, which took place a few steps away from Arsenic, at the État Civil of Canton de Vaud. They will present the administrative hardships they’ve had to deal with over the past year, and the love that helped them overcome them all. They’ll take us on a journey to the heart of Swiss and Brazilian customs, with wit, whimsy and a touch of cynicism. What if the cherry on top was a big firework?

Alice and Mayara will share the archives of their wedding. These are the records of a union that breaks codes and invents new ones, crossing gender lines and boundaries.

Note of Intent

“This last year, in addition to fighting for our passion and our artistic works, we’ve had to fight tirelessly in order to have the right to exist on this land. As immigrants, as a trans man. To not give up, we took two decisions: start the administrative process to get married after dating for two months and harass my health insurance in order to prove my existence. We had our dates in legal offices, in the waiting room of surgeons, of psychologists. Our love letters took the shape of long phone calls of grievances with the administration offices of institutions. (…)”

Mayara Yamada is a brazilian artist, performer and DJ living in Switzerland. Her artistry quickly drew interest in the midst of the Swiss arts. She has received the prize Suzanne Hochreutiner pour la performance as well as the prix d’encouragement de la Ville de Renens, which resulted in the exhibit 37° degrees in December 2021 at the ferme de Tilleuls in Renens (CH). Her research are mainly focused on performativity but she also uses photography, moving images, theater and music.
Mayara Yamada is an associate artist of l’Abri-Genève since 2022.

Alice Oechslin is a bilingual (French, German) swiss transdisciplinary artist based in Etoy, Switzerland, with a diploma from the HEAD – Haute école d’art de Genève. Through music and performance work, Alice develops a research around representations of the queer community in the countryside, by reworking the country landscape of his birthplace through the prism of fiction and focusing on the fluidity and non-binarity of many of the living beings one can find the fields, in rivers, and in the wood.
Alice Oechslin has a residency at Théâtre St-Gervais (CH) through Summer 2025.