The Sorcerers – A Play About Interracial Marriage
(2017) Exploration in Trans (Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference) — Location: University of Southern California (Los Angeles) (24.February.2017)
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- Abstract
- (en) The Sorcerers is a research-creation theatre project investigating subtle mechanisms of social exclusion within contemporary Western societies. Based on a real case observed in Belgium in the 1990s, the play explores the disintegration of an interracial marriage not through overt racism, but through collective moral pressure, symbolic delegitimization, and social isolation operating within an ostensibly progressive milieu. The creative process was informed by anthropological theory, notably Claude Lévi-Strauss’ reflections on sorcery as a performative social mechanism capable of transforming an individual’s symbolic status and, ultimately, affecting their physical integrity. The play transposes this framework into a modern European context, suggesting that processes of collective exclusion persist beneath rational, liberal, and self-proclaimed anti-racist discourses. Intertextual engagement with the Medea myth and with theatrical traditions of moral hysteria (from Euripides to Arthur Miller) structures the dramaturgy, enabling the stage to function as a laboratory for examining how social bodies construct scapegoats while preserving their moral self-image. Originally staged in Brussels and later in New York, the project exemplifies theatre as a mode of critical inquiry, where artistic form operates as both analytical instrument and site of embodied reflection on race, power, and collective responsibility.
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Citations
Goriely, S. (2017). The Sorcerers – A Play About Interracial Marriage. Exploration in Trans (Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference), University of Southern California (Los Angeles). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/272553