Maison Chaos

The new version of Maison Chaos really brings out the full power of this gripping text! 

An associate artist at the Théâtre National, Joëlle Sambi is an author, slam poet, Afro-feminist and LGBTQIA+ activist. For years, she has used poetry as a tool in the fight against all forms of oppression.

In this performance in dialogue with musician Sara Machine, she offers a magnetic presence of rare emotional depth. Armed with her incisive writing, she addresses a long letter to ‘an old friend, a dear sister’ – an intimate narrative that moves from childhood to the shattering moment of a rape. Her words pour forth with precision, without hesitation and without succumbing either to voyeurism, somewhere between modesty and the need to expose what violence does to both the body and identity. For chaos seeps in everywhere. It tears at the skin, it crushes resistance: ‘It makes people well-behaved’, she says. Saved by writing, Joëlle Sambi deconstructs the injunction to be resilient by challenging our perceptions of victims. Here, her words become a force for healing.

The stories discussed contain references to gender-based and sexual violence. 

Joëlle Sambi is an associate artist at the Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles
Coproduction by the Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles

Season 2025·2026