At 19 he enrolled at the Conservatory of Mons. “What meone shotplayed in the theater, it is the show, the red, the lightisagain, the words. I am a child, a teenager, a young woman who has kept silent. Saying other people’s words calmed my anxieties. The safest place in my life is scisnot some teaI am. Theater saved me ; without this red, this lightisre, this heat… I wouldn’t be there.”
At the Conservatory, he discovered the same universalism asAcadismy : there is no place for racism, art above all. The fall is all the more brutal. “At the end of the course I was told ‘you will never play Juliet, you will play servants’, ‘you cannot play the daughter of a white family’.“
The warning turns out to be true. Throughout his careerisre, the roles offered to him during castings and auditions are almost systematically stereotyped. “I started playing boards in Belgium at 23 years, and here I am at 46 years old. Twice I was hired for roles with western names. My bodily heritage is associated with a group – Moroccans in Belgium – and people, before thati what j‘come, stay with me a story that is not mine and projects orientalist fantasies onto me.“
With Bouchra we tell ourselves that this type of show is necessary, because there weren’t any representations of women like us on TV
