Davide-Christelle Sanvee
Qui a peur
performance, théâtre
- 1h
- B Accessible to persons with reduced mobility
Co-production : Le Grütli - Centre de production et de diffusion des Arts Vivants, Genève L’Arsenic – Centre d’art scénique contemporain, Lausanne Soutiens: Fondation Ernst Göhner, Fondation pour les interprètes suisses (SIS), Loterie Romande Cette création a bénéficié d’une résidence de recherche à la Kaserne, Bâle.
Qui a peur is a children’s game, a violent game. Davide-Christelle Sanvee borrows its name for her latest show. Starting from real life experiences of BIPOC people in public transport, this performance works on themes of racism and exclusion.
A sober stage, with little set design. Everything is passed through the gaze, the anticipation, the built-up tension. She uses her own body as a medium to project collective fears. Davide-Christelle Sanvee invokes in the theatre’s black box vulnerability, the relocation from one territory to another, the way we look at one another.
Quote:
« In her amazing Qui a peur, the Swiss performer of Togolese descent focuses on this fear of the unknown that becomes hate. Everything is sharp and brilliant in this radioscopy of self-deception. The theatre as the culmination of gaze, in other words, a grid of representation that needs to be dismantled. Davide-Christelle Sanvee plays masterfully this original function of the stage to encourage the spectator to think about their own point of view. How are we looking at the stranger who is facing us? With what preposterous condescension, what grotesque superstitions? In the courtyard of the Hôtel de Ville in Geneva last fall, she was the outcry and siren for African people rejected from the shores of Europe.”
Translated from Le Temps, Alexandre Demidoff, 13 juin 2024
Davide-Christelle Sanvee is a Swiss artist of Tongolese descent. She studies Arts at the HEAD in Geneva where she discovered performance art as a way to express the complexities of the social and political subjects that often drive her artistic explorations. She graduated with a bachelor’s in visual arts, with a minor in Art/Action. Her interest for the physicality of spaces brought her to Amsterdam, where in 2019 she got her master’s degree in interior design at the Studio for Immediate Spaces of the Sandberg Institute. That same year, Davide-Christelle received the Swiss Performance Art Award for her performance “Le ich dans nicht”. Davide-Christelle has performed in several European cultural spaces from the Rome Swiss Institute to the Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne. As well as in Paris (Centre Pompidou, Fondation Ricard), Avignon and at the Swiss Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia. In 2022, she was cast in Rébecca Chaillon’s show Carte Noire nommé désir. Together, the toured for several years. In 2023, she won the Art Kiefer Hablitzer Award during the Swiss Arts Awards at Art Basel. That same year, she won the cultural grant of the Fondation Leenards.