Stadium Mohamed El Khatib

In his latest production, Mohamed El Khatib connects the world of supporters of the RC Lens soccer club with the theater world.

The RC Lens soccer club may not win championships, but they do feature in the premier league of cultural institutions. In 2016, the Louvre’s satellite museum in Lens presented the exhibition Mémoires Sang et Or, a reference to the team’s colors, red (“blood”) and gold. A group portrait of the team’s local supporters, it brought together the former coal-mining region’s two main current sources of pride, its soccer team and its Louvre. The collection of objects donated by faithful fans for the occasion—autographed photos, posters, cub flags and pennants, jerseys and game tickets—celebrated a cultural match. Never had fans’ scarves been found so close to paintings by great masters. After this consecration, a celebration of the Blood and Gold in the theater world was the next trophy for RC Lens fans. National theaters and festivals considered arbiters of good taste are spotlighting a show simply named Stadium that brings fifty-three fans onstage. The man behind this clash of civilizations is Mohamed El Khatib, who first achieved success in theater with his 2014 Finir en beauté (To End on a High Note, 2014), a one-man show in which he told a story about himself and his mother, Yamna El Khatib. There was no suspenseful plot—“everyone knows that in the end she dies and her son is very, very sad.” Another important milestone in his theatrical career was Moi, Corinne Dadat (2015), “a documentary ballet for a cleaning woman and dancer,” about an employee at a Bourges public high school. Within a few years, El Khatib emerged as the champion of a theater of the real who stages snapshots of life while avoiding the pitfall of over-theatricality. The driving force in his creative process is his ability to open up theater to experiences that are not his own. His practice consists of short-circuiting cultural discrimination and elitist in-group and identity politics. He is on a crusade against homogeneous theater programming and the reproduction of any kind of cooptation and networking systems. ”My work,” he says, “consists of dismantling relations of domination by challenging the way we do theater.” SOCIAL SCULPTURE El Khatib uses a wisecrack to define the aesthetic challenge that Stadium sets out to meet: to bring together theater fans and “France’s top fans,” as Lens supporters are known. “It’s as if I took a few rows of stadium seats with fifty-three Lens supporters on them and plopped them down onstage.” Bollaert stadium, built in the 1930s by the mining company and its miners, symbolizes the unwavering faith of several generations of Blood and Gold fans. “Anyone who hasn’t sat in the Marek stands at Bollaert stadium has no idea of what a live show can be,” El Khatib intones. At any rate, you have to attend a RC Lens match if you want to understand the true meaning of the cliché describing an audience “at fever pitch.” If soccer fans are fascinating, RC lens fans are the most fascinating of all, at least in France. That’s clearly demonstrated in El Khatib’s production, even if it’s slightly ambiguous at times. In a region whose public health indicators are the country’s worst—unemployment, alcoholism, suicide, support for the far-right National Front and the physical scars left by its mining past—the popular passion for a soccer team can take on a pathological dimension, as even fans admit. This can be called the paradox of the supporter. El Khatib’s approach is anything but judgmental. He lets these anonymous men and women speak on a theater stage without rewriting or in any other way changing their words. He also shoots and edits documentary footage, sometimes live and at others reconstitutions. For him, therefore, “RC Lens cheerleaders are like a ready-made,” as he explained in the fan magazine So Foot (no. 147, June 2017). If Duchamp is in the house, why not Beuys? The latter’s extended conception of art as “social sculpture” works very well in this context. El Khatib, like RC

Lens fans themselves, deploys all the stereotypes that structure their representation. In addition to the cheerleaders decked out in Blood and Gold, also featured onstage is Momo’s french-fry stand (made famous in the movie Bienvenue chez les Chtis), the stadium’s brass band, the dancing mascots, the plastic refreshment stand chairs and Les Corons (a song by Pierre Bachelet that has become the half-time hymn). This protocol lends the stadium’s banality a folkloric dimension and immediately empties us of our prejudices. The fans’ statements are given using the same strategy to emancipate them from caricatural reductionism and corny television memes. El Khatib’s reality theater doesn’t dish out personal confessions, barroom platitudes, didactic asides and faux cinema-vérité interviews conducted by a filmmaker on site and behind the scenes. Even “ultras” are allowed to state certain truths about stadium violence and confess to their true affective hierarchy: “First my four children, then RC Lens, and last, my wife.” The unfolding spectacle provides copious emotional moments, disturbing sequences and comic distancing, as when, for example, a man named Kevin says, “You go to Bollaert, and out of 26,000 people, 12,000 are Kevins.” El Khatib explained the voyeuristic aspect of his approach in an interview in the magazine Volailles (no. 1, 2012) during the period when he was putting together Moi, Corinne Dadat: “On the pretext of not falling into TV obscenity people produce nothing but inoffensive theater. Actually, the voyeuristic dimension can be very stimulating in my work. It poses the question of the audience’s gaze in our theatrical mechanisms and asks us to get over our expectations and become truly discerning by recognizing the fantasies that each of us have about a “real” cleaning woman.”

ASTONISHMENT AND TREMBLING

Going beyond a mini-anthropological study of underprivileged soccer fans and their communal rituals and Pavlovian jubilation, Stadium emphasizes the human complexity of personal ventures. The joys and pains of evening games resonate with existential dramas. We’re astonished and even shudder when we find out that some thirty of the supporters on stage are from the same family, led by the 85-year-old Yvette Dupuis, with her troop of ten children, thirty-two grandchildren and twenty-nine great-grandchildren, all united by their passion for RC Lens. All united by the pain of the premature loss of a family member. With his interest in the fans of this emblematic team, El Khatib is putting forward a theater of the personal, both individual and universal, where waving a giant flag in a stadium for ninety minutes every two weeks is a personal homage to a deceased mother.

Mohamed El Khatib Né en 1983. Vit et travaille à Orléans et à Bruxelles Créations récentes : 2014 Cultiver l'échec (performance) ; Finir en beauté (performance documentaire); Corps de ballet (édition) 2015 Moi, Corinne Dadat (performance documentaire); Les Gagnants (performance) ; Renault 12 TS (installation) 2016 Bande originale #1 (édition) ; Prison (performance carcérale); Corps de ballet (film/installation) 2017 Parking (installation) ; Renault 12 (film) ; C’est la vie (performance documentaire); Plagiat (performance littéraire)