
In the face of the world’s rapidly growing fascist tendencies, Rébecca Chaillon breathes new life into our imagination with a science-fiction fable in which survival goes hand in hand with magic. After Plutôt vomir que faillir, which was widely acclaimed in our house in 2024, Rébecca Chaillon’s new work echoes and references Octavia Butler’s cult novel Parable of the Sower, in which we follow a teenage girl who invents her own religion in order to survive in a devastated world. The artist wanted to take this idea further: ‘I have magical faith, and it’s one of my strategies as a Black, fat, ageing, childless lesbian woman’. By seeking to deconstruct the mechanisms of exclusion, Rébecca Chaillon forges new mythologies focused on queer representations nourished by astrology and superstitions. She proposes a narrative in which fat, racialized, queer bodies can simply exist, free from normative injunctions. La Parabole du Seum is at once an exciting performance and an act of resistance, shifting perspectives and, above all, inciting us to dream differently. The stories featured in this production deal with fatphobia, queerphobia, racism, transphobia, sexism and sexual violence. This show contains scenes of nudity and uses smoke. Rébecca Chaillon is an associate artist at the Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles Coproduction Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles Copresentation Kaaitheater