The French theater-maker Rébecca Chaillon pushes her body to startling extremes onstage. In “Carte Noire Named Desire,” from 2021, she spent 40 minutes scrubbing the boards on her knees; in “The Cake,” which has been part of her repertoire for 15 years, she slowly ingests raw ingredients — milk, flour, eggs — to “bake” a birthday cake inside her body.
Yet after two decades of performing, Chaillon said recently that her body didn’t quite hold up the way it used to. During a performance of “The Cake” last year in Brussels, she couldn’t keep eating and threw up. She washed herself onstage and continued the show.
“It was spectacular,” she recalled dryly.
Once a fixture of France’s underground theater scene, Chaillon, 40, is entering a delicate phase in her career. Just as she has achieved national and international prominence, she is becoming less willing to subject her body to the punishment that has long been central to her work. Next week, she will unveil a large-scale new production, “The Parable of the Sour,” at the prestigious Wiener Festwochen festival in Vienna, with an international tour to follow — but she won’t be onstage herself.
Chaillon said that decision had caused some consternation among the show’s production partners. “Someone told me, ‘No one is going to hurt themselves like you do,’” she said.
Others may be leading the cast, but “The Parable of the Sour” bears Chaillon’s artistic signature. Since founding her own theater company in 2006, she has developed an oeuvre at the crossroads of performance art and political theater, in which she builds surreal tableaux out of radical physical experiments.
Her productions are rooted in her experiences as a Black woman in France, where she grew up in the northern region of Picardy, the daughter of parents from Martinique, a French territory in the Caribbean. Chaillon’s rise has coincided with a broader reckoning over the dearth of racial diversity in French theater. “Institutions realized that they had no Black directors, and there was a desire for more representation,” Chaillon said, adding with a touch of irony: “I’m a little bit of a rebel, which they like, but I’m not tearing the place down.”
In “The Parable of the Sour,” Chaillon turns another social stigma on its head: She has cast only performers whom she described as “fat,” a label that she also applies to herself. “I thought that I needed to see how, perhaps, we could form a community,” she said.
As often with Chaillon, the new production involves food: The sets being built as she spoke at the Théâtre Public de Montreuil, in a suburb of Paris, involved tall structures that looked as if they were made from butter.
She found inspiration, she said, during a two-month stay in New Orleans last year as part of the Villa Albertine artist residency program, run by the French Embassy in the United States. “I knew I was fat, but all of a sudden there were more fat people around me,” Chaillon said. “I was able to take yoga classes run by Black teachers, with other fat students” she added. “That shift made me think that I could practice self-care.”
That meant reckoning with her intense focus on performing, too. Her success has made it hard to maintain a personal life — a fact that Chaillon addressed onstage in “La Gouineraie,” a 2025 work whose name means something like “The Lesbian Orchard,” a Chekhov pun. In this intimate work, she and her real-life partner, the poet and performer Sandra Calderan, wrestle with their own disagreements while cooking and building furniture.
“It did us so much good, even though we had to find a balance at home,” Chaillon said.
Sparing her body as she made “The Parable of the Sour” was a necessity for another reason. Chaillon is currently trying to have a child through artificial insemination — a complicated process in France, where the procedure has been open to single women and lesbians only since 2021. “It’s also more difficult when you’re fat,” Chaillon said. “You’re often sent away and told to lose weight first.”
Her stamina remains impressive. Just this season, Chaillon has toured with five other shows, including “The Cake,” and presented a 40-hour marathon at Le Carreau du Temple, an arts venue in Paris, to celebrate her 40th birthday. Her team sometimes pushes her to be more careful. Céline Champinot, a long-term collaborator who is co-directing “The Parable of the Sour,” said she just couldn’t watch “The Cake” anymore: “When is it too much on the body? Of course we worry.”
With her latest show, Chaillon will also make her return this summer to the Avignon Festival, France’s largest theater event. The last time she performed there, in 2023, members of the Black cast of “Carte Noire Named Desire” were subjected to racist attacks during the show’s run. In a scene involving audience interaction, a male audience member forcefully twisted one performer’s arm; later, the actress reported being accosted in the streets of Avignon.
After the incidents were made public, Chaillon and her team were targeted by a wave of racist abuse online. A security protocol was added to allow them to enter and exit the theater safely when the show traveled to the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris. (There will be security measures in Avignon for “The Parable of the Sour,” too.) Last year, a French court found six people guilty of cyber-harassing Chaillon and handed out suspended prison sentences ranging from two to four months.
“It was quite violent to see them at the trial,” Chaillon said. “I also felt pity for them. They were mostly older people, sometimes living in isolation — yet they were all openly racist.”
It hasn’t deterred Chaillon from investing in community engagement. From the age of 19 to 32, alongside her own work, she toured France with a theater company that engages audiences in sociopolitical debates. She also frequently works with drama schools to encourage better representation. In France, she said, there is now “a real desire to tackle the absence of racial minorities onstage, even though the means to do it aren’t always there.”
With “The Parable of the Sour,” she is also working out how to direct others — including some amateurs — through the kind of physically daring performances she favors. “It’s hard to verify if someone is a performance artist ahead of time,” she said. “We check in very regularly.”
And while audiences won’t see her onstage in Vienna or Avignon, in rehearsal she still stepped in to test out some of the material herself. That is what it takes to guide her cast, Chaillon said, adding: “I need to have things go through my body to really understand them.”
The post She Punished Her Body Onstage For Years. Now, She’s Testing New Limits. appeared first on New York Times.
