La Fracture

« Dad, do you know what the Algerian war and alcohol have in common?
I’ve found three: silence, taboo and shame.»

When she was a child, the girl who said these words saw her father as a hero. The kind of hero she wanted to be like when she grew up. And then time took its toll. The daughter grew up, and the hero grew old, tilting little by little into the crevices of his own memory, into the tortuous grooves of life, as if searching for something, making up for something missing, or forgetting themselves. Until the day the young woman decided to cut all ties. To stop seeing her father. Little by little, she erased him from her memories, like an old drawing fading away…

In this raw solo performance, Yasmine Yahiatène sets off in the footsteps of her father Ahmed, who she had to come to terms with while he was still alive. Using video and mapping as her raw material and playing partner, she probes the cracks in this painful, interrupted relationship, to find her way back among the fragments of legacy she carries within her that seem so far away. From personal archives to historical documents, the images intermingle, and Ahmed’s memory is reconstructed, in bits and pieces: his Kabyle origins, his exile to France in the midst of the revolution. The loss of his mother tongue, which he abandoned as he gradually assimilated the culture of the colonial power. But also the jubilation, the 1998 World Cup final and Zidane’s two goals, a glorious version of a Franco-Algerian memory full of scars. And, between these two shores, alcohol, as a poor remedy for this decomposed past.

Yasmine Yahiatène has co-written La Fracture, a first show as discreet as disturbing, produced with her creative team. Through a subtle interplay of oral evocations and visual superimpositions, she slips into the gaps in her family history, transforming the stage into a place of investigation and reparation. Grabbing hold of this succession of traumas and wounds passed down from generation to generation, she uses the power of words, images and fiction to reconstruct her own history, and to define new paths of personal and collective resilience.

Award of the Youth Jury at the Festival Fast Forward 2022 (Dresden, DE)

Nominated at the 2023 Critics’ Prize for Best Scenography

Award of the Youth Jury at the Festival Impatience 2023 (Paris, FR)