by A stage play based on the attempt by the men who put Gisèle Pelicot in drugs and raped is organized this week in the southern city of Avignon, since France continues to discuss the lessons for society from the country’s largest rape process.
The three-hour performance, the Pelicot process: tribute to Gisèle Pelicot, was created by Milo Rau, the Swiss director and playwright, for his theater interpretation of court proceedings, including the Moscow legal process against the Russian punk pussy uprisings and the trial against the Romanian Despot Nicolae Ceaușescu.
The piece has the support of Pelicot’s lawyers and feminist groups, and Rau said he forced himself to transform the process into a play: “Nothing would have been not to speak of Gaza or Ukraine, it would have been a silence that is approaching.”
The director said that the Pelicot piece was about looking at the rape culture, the trivialization of rape and the patriarchy in all its forms. “Due to the Pelicot process, we are ourselves and our society in court,” he said.
Pelicot was celebrated worldwide after avoiding her right to anonymity to ensure a public trial against her ex-husband Dominique Pelicot, who put her unconscious under drugs and invited dozens of men to her bedroom in an Internet forum in 2011 in the southern village of Maza for almost a decade. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison in December, and guilty judgments were returned for all 51 accused men.
Gisèle Pelicot, who had said in court that she wanted “the entire society to change a witness and” shame must change the sides “, this week in view of the best bourgeois honor of France, the Legion d’Unneur, in recognition of her determination to expose and change what she called” macho, patriarchal society “that trivialized.
Rau, who worked with the playwright Servane Dècle to create the performance, said Pelicot’s decision to choose a public process instead of keeping the case behind closed doors, the courtroom actually opened like a theater. “So we thought we should now turn the theater into a courtroom,” he said.
The performance consists of staged readings of excerpts from the attempt to report the police files, social comment and psychiatric reports. It deals with the 51 convicts and the question of how these men, including a nurse, a soldier, a journalist, a prison attendant and delivery drivers between the ages of 26 and 74, can travel to Pelicot’s house to rape them. More than 50 artists will read excerpts from the process, and those on stage will contain a psychiatric expert from the case and court artists who were present in the process.
Rau said it was important to stage the play in Avignon, where the process took place and where the crowds had gathered in front of the court every day to cheer Gisèle Pelicot and where the city walls were plastered with their quotations. It is staged in an open-air Carmelite monastery from the 14th century with seats for 500 people as part of the city’s renowned theater festival. With a massive local interest, however, Rau said that it would also be in cinemas in Avignon and online livestream.
Rau said he decided to create the piece while preparing another piece, La Lettre, for the Avignon Festival. After tackling other big studies on stage, he said that it was an “absurd silence” not to work on the Pelicot case. “In the German-speaking world, Avignon is not famous for the theater festival, it is famous for the Pelicot test.”
Pelicot’s lawyers approved the idea, and journalists and researchers willingly gave thousands of their notebooks to put together the process. “It was clear to everyone that we had to do this, especially here in Avignon and especially now,” he said.
The experiment contained difficult topics for staged readings. “At the beginning there were many different topics – the rapists themselves, rape culture, masculinity, the family, the rooms in which this happened,” said Rau. “And then we followed the series of the process and the questions you have raised in society, the media and in the minds of people.”
The performance deals with the cross -interpretation of the accused men and their initial survey by the police, whereby their relocation awareness of what was at stake is shown. “We really see the culture they come from, the patriarchal system, fraternity and the rape culture that produces this,” said Rau. “There was a moment of growing consciousness in this city, but also in this country and in civilization as a whole, to understand human relationships and how they developed under a regime of capitalism, a regime of internet pornography, patriarchy and drug -related abuse.”
The piece underlined him how “ubiquitous” rape was in society, said Rau.
A first performance took place last month at the Vienna Festival, which lasted seven hours, and the play will travel to other cities such as Lisbon, Belgrade and Warsaw.
Dècle, the co-author of the play, said: “It is about pulling all the threads with the audience to understand what these men were different from one another-to converge on this bedroom, share recipes for the drug width of women, women near them beat near them, which should also be raped.
The Pelicot Trial: Homage to Gisèle Pelicot, Avignon Festival, July 18 and online streamed online
