Autophagies: A culinary performance created, directed, and performed by Eva Doumbia

Autophagies (Stories of bananas, rice, tomatoes, peanuts, palm trees, fruits, sugar, chocolate)

An excerpt of the play, Autophagies, followed by a discussion around the decolonization of art with the creator, Eva Doumbia and performers. 

The event is part of the Le mois de la francophonie (Francophone Month,) a month-long festival highlighting the diversity of the French-speaking world.     

March 4  | 5:30 pm | 1519 Jackson Ave. | Free and open to the public | Outdoor if weather permits

The Alliance Française of New Orleans is hosting playwright and director Eva Doumbia for a musical reading of an excerpt from her play Autophagies, which will be followed by a Q&A. This event is organized in partnership with Villa Albertine, the Consulate General of France in Louisiana, the Face Foundation, and Tulane University.

About the performance:

In this performance, Eva Doumbia and her multidisciplinary team will welcome the audience to a festive documentary communion, created to be presented in any setting where cooking is possible. The performers and researchers will tell intimate and trivial
stories and parts of world history, while a meal is prepared using peanuts, oils, bananas, chocolate, tomatoes, and other vegetables. 

This phase of Dombia's residency will be dedicated to adapting the show to an American audience, including working on the translation of the text and building partnerships for the distribution of the show in 2022-23 in the United States and more specifically in New Orleans. During her stay in New Orleans, Eva Doumbia will be joined by two artists who have accompanied the development of the show in France – actress Olga Mouak and musician Lionel Elian.

The French version of the play "Autophagies," written and directed by Eva Doumbia, initially premiered in French at the Festival d’Avignon in July 2021 to an audience thrilled by the mélange of “traditional disciplines joined by another, widely popular one: Cooking. Alongside a busy chef-actor, the performers including a musician, a dancer-actress, and a mistress of ceremony, lead us to a place somewhere between Africa and Europe, where all the ingredients come together for a great celebration of the senses. Eva Doumbia thinks of the show as a ‘documentary Eucharist' and encourages us to think about the political dimensions of food.”

Eva Doumbia

Author, director, actress, Eva Doumbia trained in theater at the University of Aix-en Provence then at the Nomadic Directing Unit (CNSAD) where she studied alongside Jacques Lassalle, Krystian Lupa and Andre Engel. In 2000, she founded the company La Part du Pauvre/Nana Triban and quickly became interested in authors such as Marie-Louise Mumbu, Léonora Miano, Maryse Condé, Dieudonné Niangouna and Aristide Tarnagda. Eva Doumbia is part of this generation which carefully observes the way in which racial relations, inherited from French colonial history, are still expressed today in society. In 2016, she founded the multidisciplinary Afropea festival which promotes Afro-European creators and since September 2019, her company has occupied the Théâtre des Bains Douches in Elbeuf, a working-class and multicultural town in Normandy.