Water, l’atterrée des eaux vives

Water, l’atterrée des eaux vives explores the underlying friction of our perceptions of racialised female bodies. Crossed by a continuum of forms and figures linked to representations of Black history and her own imaginary of the Black body, Water’s body is a dangling object lost between ‘how to be perceived’ and ‘how to express oneself’.

Sailing through the limbo of dual belonging, this performative poem comments on the racial experience of the self. Through a choreography of de-structuring, Water, l’atterrée des eaux vives exposes the violently fragile nature of the body of bone and the body of flesh. The articulation of this body culminates in a speech, becoming a statement, a positioning, which takes the audience to task, sometimes as a witness, sometimes as a hostage.

With her first show, Castélie Yalombo embarks on what she defines as the odyssey of becoming black. Born to a Belgian mother and a Congolese father, she evokes the difficult ambivalence of bodies caught in a vice of friction and tension between the categories of belonging: the over there of origin, and the here, the place of lived experience. Her choreography is informed by her studies at ISAC, her work with Faustin Linyekula and then Louise Vanneste, and inhabits the discrepancy. Between embodiment and haunting, she visits narratives, memories and territories where, suspended between the spectator’s gaze and her own subjectivity, her body, the object that unwillingly deposits stories of domination, displacement, exile and hope, plays out.