“I am lucky to be able to tell stories that can visitize people who are not. I get it”: in “Tair”, Tamara Al Saadi rewrites the myth of Antigone to evoke the broken trajectories of some 400,000 children placed in France.
In this show presented to La Fabrica at the Avignon Festival on Monday, the Franco-Iraqi director imagined a story in which two teenage girls face each other.
On the one hand, Antigone, a figure of the revolt, which here refuses to speak to show his opposition to the royal power. On the other, Eden, child then young teenager, placed from foster families in the home, who screams her anger and her distress in the face of racism and forced work.
“Tire” also shows violence in homes, the absurdity of certain administrative decisions, poor professionals who are crumbling under the files.
“Sensitive to the psychic state of youth” of today, it is, for Tamara Al Saadi, to launch a warning cry on a “completely saturated” public policy and on “the invisibilization, on French soil, of the fate of 400,000 children”, she testifies to AFP during the pre-tour of her play.
The social assistance sector for childhood (ASE, ex-DDASS) has been vacillating for several years, shaken by a lack of budget, a shortage of professionals, a exhaustion of actors in the field and saturated justice.
A commission of inquiry of the National Assembly published in April a report, in which it issues several recommendations, including a programming law or the creation of a compensation committee.
In 2022, nearly 380,000 children were affected by ASE measures, including 55% placed outside their families.
– “Reflection tool” –
On the set, the two tragic stories of Eden and Antigone are posed in delicacy by a scenography mixing realistic or fantastic universe. A musical partition made up of Arab songs and sound effects, played live by three performers, punctuates the different paintings.
Born in Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq war, arrived in France at the age of five, Tamara Al Saadi grew up in Paris, studied the social sciences, trained in the profession of actress before making a master with the philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour in Sciences Po Paris. In her work, which she claims as “documented” theater made from “verified events”, the social sciences are never far away.
“The course of Eden, her childhood, is very typical,” says the thirties, who writes or stages in France since 2011. She created her company in 2016, in order to “make theater a tool for expression and reflection with young people”.
To write this piece, she relied on several research, in particular workshops carried out in child psychiatry services as well as on interviews with children placed or having been, with specialized educators and managers of ASE in Seine-Saint-Denis and Gard.
His reflection was also nourished by theater workshops carried out with adolescents from Paris and the northern suburbs of the capital.
Posted on July 20 at 12:41 p.m. AFP
