La Fête

Anne-Cécile Vandalem and Joëlle Sambi draw on a real event that deeply marked Dutch-speaking Belgium: the death of Sanda Dia in December 2018, following an initiation ritual within an elitist student fraternity.

Starting from this tragedy and the trial of the members of Reuzegom, their creative team undertakes a long-term exploration of the mechanisms that protect elites, the denial of racism, and the reproduction of social privilege.

Surrounded by their collaborators, they imagine a fiction born of the impossible: a meeting between the victim’s family and the families of two of the convicted men, accompanied by a filmmaker. What was intended as a gesture of symbolic reparation turns into a closed-door confrontation in which the fault lines of a society marked by guilt, erasure, and the violence of inherited legacies are laid bare.

Oscillating between investigation and mise en abyme, LA FÊTE questions the power of storytelling: who speaks, on whose behalf, and at what cost? Theatre becomes a space for experimentation, where reality and fiction rub against each other, where silenced narratives can emerge without any promise of consolation or forgiveness. At the crossroads of the political and the intimate, the play seeks to make visible the shadowy zones left by the handling of this story—those unresolved areas that theatre brings into the open.