France’s reckoning with sexual violence isn’t over.
After the case of Gisèle Pélicot, whose husband was found guilty in 2024 of drugging her and inviting strangers to sexually assault her, another large-scale trial looms on the horizon. This year, 17 men will appear in a French court on charges of gang rape and human trafficking that prosecutors say were linked to a pornographic website. And theater is already on the case.
Pélicot’s story was retold by actors after the initial proceedings concluded, in a staged reading by the Swiss director Milo Rau, and now the pending “French Bukkake” trial — named after the platform where videos of the alleged crimes were distributed — has inspired an unsettling, if slightly jumbled, new piece of musical theater, called “Dogs.” That’s before anybody has even had their day in court.
Mercifully, the fast-rising French director Lorraine de Sagazan, who comes from a prominent artistic family that includes the pop star Zaho de Sagazan, makes no attempt to recreate onstage the exploitation and torture that the prosecution alleges in the case, in which 42 women are due to testify. In the playbill, De Sagazan describes “Dogs,” which premiered last week at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris, as “a visual and musical installation” rather than a play.
Details about the case are provided onstage mostly through projected text. The action unfolds in a series of surreal operatic tableaux, led by the ensemble Miroirs Étendus, whose members sing about sexual exploitation to liturgical music.
It makes for an eerily haunting atmosphere, heightened by Anouk Maugein’s extraordinary sets. A sea of damp, wrinkled garments covers the stage floor, which is level with the first row of audience members and goes right up to their feet. As I stepped onto the fabric to get to my seat, bodily fluids came nauseatingly to mind.
Despite a lack of direct re-enactment, “Dogs” still requires a sturdy constitution. The women, a text reminds us at the start of the show, say they were raped and coerced by an organized network into filming increasingly violent pornographic scenes, some involving dozens of men, which were then made public against their consent. (Before the performance, a trigger warning in red capital letters advised us to “feel free to leave the auditorium at any time.”)
“Yet everything had started like a fairy tale,” a man says in the opening scene, stepping forward on the slimy floor. His features obscured by a tight, flesh-colored mask, he proceeds to tell the story of Daphné (a pseudonym for one of the women), in a voice grotesquely warped by audio effects. Daphné says that she was ensnared by a man posing as a friendly woman online and later raped during an encounter that she believed would be well-paid sex work, and was then “offered” to one of the website’s producers for the pornographic shoots.
The cast of musicians then appear to initiate a descent into hell, in musical scenes featuring reorchestrated music by J.S. Bach. “Dead, stunned, I obeyed, torn apart by your images,” a woman in a white veil laments. “We massacre and live well,” the men sing, hidden behind dog masks.
Above their heads, projected text describes in plain terms a real video from the French Bukkake website: a scene in which over 100 men gather to have sex with one woman in an isolated storage building. Excruciatingly, we read about their arrival, the woman’s fear and pain, the acts she is subjected to while she cries and bleeds.
Only one excerpt from the French Bukkake shoot is shown: an organizer opening the building’s front gate to a huge group of masked men, who file into the building in disciplined fashion, without saying a word. Their casual camaraderie still sends a chill down my spine.
De Sagazan should probably have stopped at that contrast between the real pornographic shoot and the musical musings underneath. Unfortunately, “Dogs” keeps adding new, sometimes jarring layers. In an attempt to lighten the mood, the actor Léo-Antonin Lutinier appears as a performative male feminist, with exaggerated, affected demonstrations of care. His comedic interludes drew laughter, but given the gravity of the allegations, they also felt lifted from a different show altogether.
De Sagazan herself also appears onstage at the very end, for a short postscript. After explaining that she met many of the case’s witnesses, she recites some excerpts from a conversations with Daphné, touching on her mixed feelings about the legal proceedings. De Sagazan says Daphné would like the audience to leave the show “asking themselves: ‘What do I do, now that I know?’”
It’s an earnest yet slightly awkward final note. What are we supposed to do, exactly, with such horror? Bearing witness to it is already a trial of sorts — and the real-life justice system has yet to do its work.
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