Trust the Process | Ep.2 – Frédérique Lecomte

Trust the Process is a podcast about socially engaged arts that invites you to trust the unconventional nature of artistic processes and, more importantly, the impact they can have over time. This project is part of the Ask, Pay, Trust the Artist campaign and is supported by the Alliance for Socially Engaged Arts.

The guest of this second episode is the Belgian theatre director Frédérique Lecomte, founder of Théâtre & Réconciliation, a professional theatre company that brings people together through participatory theatre, nurturing connection and reconciliation.

At the heart of the conversation is Les Liaisons Joyeuses, an extraordinary project that each year brings together more than sixty people from across Brussels: ordinary citizens with different backgrounds, languages, and life experiences, many of whom might never otherwise cross paths. No previous theatre experience is required: the guiding principle is that everyone has something to share and is welcome to do so.

Developed over more than twenty-five years of work with communities affected by conflict, displacement, and exclusion, Frédérique’s methodology is grounded in a simple but radical idea: theatre does not ask people to relive their suffering, but offers a space where they can meet, play, create, and be recognised by others. The process itself becomes a form of community-building, contributing to what, in the language of public policy, we might call social cohesion.

If you would like to explore her methodology further, we recommend reading Théâtre & Réconciliation: A Method for Theatre Practice in Conflict Zones, a collection of field notes, correspondence and testimonies documenting the evolution of her practice.

Special guest:

Frédérique Lecomte

Music credits:

Original music by Kerem Çelikoğlu

Episode produced and hosted by:

Sara Bandinu, Culture Action Europe

This podcast aims to spark an ongoing conversation around socially engaged arts — one we hope to nurture by collecting grounded stories of change-making. If you are a socially engaged practitioner and would like to share your experience, feel free to get in touch at sara@cultureactioneurope.org — I would love to hear from you!

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:03

Hi, I'm Sarah from Culture Action Europe and welcome to Trust the Process, a podcast about social engaged arts that invites you to trust the unconventionality of artistic processes and more importantly, the impact they can have over time. This project is part of the Ask Pay Trust the Artist campaign and is supported by the Alliance for Social Engaged Arts. When we mention social engaged arts, we refer to collaborative community-centered practices where artists and participants co-create artistic responses to social, environmental, and political issues. In this space, artists and cultural workers share their experiences and reflections on how they foster local ownership and active citizenship through art and how their work creates change-making impact, giving voice to both the successes and the challenges encountered along the way. Enjoy listening. Every year, through this performance, people from all walks of life come together, ordinary citizens, people from Brussels, you might pass every day in the street, at the supermarket or on the metro. We're not talking about trained actors. People from different neighborhoods, with different backgrounds, with different cultures. This format somewhere between improvisation and theatre brings them into a shared space of connection. A physical space, yes, but also an emotional one.

SPEAKER_01 2:17

So uh I'm Frederic Lecomte. I'm a play director and uh writer. I'm a director of uh Theatre and Reconciliation which is uh a theatre specialized in doing theatre with the community, the people left behind, but not only. The specialization I had is to put people together who never met. The more exotic things I do is putting people in conflict together. For example, a perpetrator and victim of torture in Africa, or child soldier and victim of rapes, or prisoners and displaced people in conflict zone in Congo, Rwanda, Burundi. But for the moment I'm I'm working more in Belgium and in Europe uh because it's very difficult to work in Africa because of the conflict. And but is the the way I'm working is the same, that putting people together. For example, uh for the moment I'm working on Les Liaison Joyeuses. We put on stage 60 people together in four groups first and after I put them together. And they come from they come from different associations, different backgrounds, uh different some people are drugs addicted, uh some people are without with administrative problem, no papers, or some people are actors, or everybody is welcome, but I don't want to work with people separate in their own ethnic group. My main objective is to put people together.

SPEAKER_03 4:23

The voice you just heard belongs to Frederick Le Comte, a Belgian director and the founder of Theatre Reconciliacion, which works through a socially engaged artistic practice she has been developing for over the past 25 years. Throughout her work, which has taken place largely in Africa, she has created performances with people from more vulnerable communities, people living in conflict zones or struggling with addiction, prisoners, survivors of torture, refugees. In 2005, she decided to give this work a more structured framework, creating the organization theatre and reconciliacion as a way to develop and transmit her practice over time. At its core, the approach is about creating change, both within individuals and between them, through theater. And this is precisely what takes shape in Les Liaison Joyeuses. The idea is to use theatre as a tool for processes of reconciliation and reconstruction by giving form to lived experiences and creating a space of trust where participants can, through the act of playing together, begin to lose informs of mutual distrust.

SPEAKER_01 5:43

Then we did it for 10 years now. Um and it's um everybody wants to reach it. Then it's very easy to find the people, but in the beginning it was not as easy because to make this kind of mediation with the population, it's not as easy. More the people are fragile, more difficult is to reach them. Then we have a lot, uh a big work of mediation to to reach them, to go to the association, to speak with the people, to explain what we are doing as theatre. Uh, because most of the people are afraid to say, oh no, I don't want to do theatre, I can't remember a single sentence, or I can't speak French, or I can't speak, and for me it's not a problem. You don't have to to learn by heart the text, you don't have to speak French, you have to speak your own language, and it's not very difficult, and you don't have to be an actor, you have you can be very, very, very shy and not very self, not a lot of self-confident confidence, and it works. This is the principle. Everybody can play, everybody has something to share with the audience, everybody has to speak about what they want. Um I can explain how I I manage it.

SPEAKER_03 7:18

Yeah, this is why I guess it's called Le Liaison Joyeuse.

SPEAKER_01 7:21

Yeah, it's called the Liaison Joyeuse because uh it's a reference of Le Liaison Dangereuse. It's a famous book. Uh but I changed the word and I in Les Liaison Joyeuse and it's a funny link, or I don't know how to say in English, uh because the people are linked in a very joyful place and they they reach the others, they can speak with the others, they can share their daily life with the others, they can meet people, they never meet in other circumstances. You never if you don't want, you never meet people without paper. If you don't want, you never meet people, drugs addict people, you never meet uh disabled people, you never no. If then this is the place when people meet the others.

SPEAKER_02 8:20

And it's freely accessible, everybody can take part in it.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

Yes, everybody, and it's free, of course.

SPEAKER_03 8:27

And you facilitate it.

SPEAKER_01 8:29

Yes, I facilitate it, and then we we try to to put people uh from everywhere in the same uh stage, safe space.

SPEAKER_02 8:39

And you never know in advance what the final uh show or the result is gonna be.

SPEAKER_01 8:46

With sixty people on stage, imagine.

SPEAKER_03 8:48

But I can explain now our I know it can be hard to picture what this kind of performance actually looks like. A group of more than sixty people from different social backgrounds, often not sharing the same language, and with no prior experience except for a shared trust in the freedom the theater can offer. So let's try something. I invite you to close your eyes and imagine a group of people in front of you, not costumes, no set design, just people and their lived experiences. A visually impaired woman dancing the tango, a person in a wheelchair racing through the space with the others running after her. Voices begin to overlap, sometimes in different languages, speaking out the small absurdities of everyday life. And then, at a height of this intensity, those voices turn into songs, and suddenly a brief unexpected scene of comedy musical unfolds in front of you.

SPEAKER_00 10:11

So it's just not exactly so.

SPEAKER_03 10:21

But how does something like this come together, you may ask? Friedrich explained to me that before reaching the stage, the participants meet over several sessions during the week. In smaller groups, they are invited to bring forward themes that matter to them, something they want to share or to express, or perhaps to release through the other. From there, they build short spontaneous improvisations. And from these moments, Frederick identifies what Roland Bart would call the punctum, a moment, a gesture or detail that appears and distils a person's presence, sometimes even through the crossing of languages in the room.

SPEAKER_01 11:10

So then we try to manage with the language. And also it's important different language, because the the effort we make to understand each other and then then they can understand me, the tr the time for translation to try and to explain, and so is also a part of the way we are going to try to understand each other and to be together. That is not a a losing, uh it's not a losing time. No, no, no. It's very important for the process. But most of the time it's in French here in Belgium, in Africa, it's uh in one in uh Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Swahili, but it's not a problem now. Here it's in French, and the result will be in French, and some people are are speaking uh Spanish or English or Chinese sometimes or Arabic or or Swali or whatever. But you know, when you are a spectator, you can under you don't the words are not coming in your heads, it's coming in your hearts, and it's not about the understanding really the words, it's understanding the feeling, it's understanding the way the people are sharing their own story, it's the way they are involved in what they have to say and you know the emergency they have to share their what they have to defend on stage. And also it's important for the people to share uh also they are recognized because sometimes people never spoke about about their what happens in their life because they don't have the space to do it and do it openly though in publicly. Uh there is an effect to them uh because they they they are recognized as people who don't have any people, people who are disabled, people who have problems of toxic amania or whatever, then it's important for them to speak louder about what they are living, facing in their life. But it's not dramatic. That's a part of my work because it's the liaison joyeuse. It's not only the liaison joyeuse, but all my work is not dramatic because I'm working with people who face very horrible stories, very dramatic, traumatic stories. But it's not my place to push the button of their suffering. I am also there to push them up and to to cross over you you never forget, but you can cross over your problematic and to be proud of your life and to be uh um to there I'm going to use a to symbolize also to symbolize what happens to them. That's it's not a documentary theater. No, I don't I'm not doing a documentary theater. I I put it on stage and I make uh theatrical scene scenes and funny scenes, and also then they can uh cross their their problematic. Then if you come to see Liaison Joyeuse, sometimes it's very cathartic, but sometimes it's very funny also, because the people enjoy it and also uh it's like a path. The the all the the reasons are like a path they come through. The first uh improvisation sometimes is sad, but the the fact that we repeat uh um a a directing and a new scenes about what they they have done in the first side, the it it change it changed your mind. And this process this process is joyful and also is joyful also for the actors but also for the Indeed.

SPEAKER_03 15:55

What matters in Frederick's methodology is the process itself and the way people are not just involved in it but actively shape it. In the Atelier of Theatre Reconciliaon, nothing is sacrificed in the name of a final result. What happens there is already the point. Meaning emerges in the doing, and most importantly in the encounter. In that sense, this is a clear example of socially engaged art, a practice rooted in communities, built on participation, attentive to process as something meaningful in itself. But it is also about something else. It's the celebration of the connection it creates between people, as a sense of community that may not have existed before, or that has been disrupted or made fragile by external circumstances, like the ones that led Frederick to begin Lison Joyeuse in the first place.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

I did I I started because it was after the the bombing in Brussels ten years now, uh Lisat uh de Bruxelles and uh there was money uh for to put social cohesion because they realize the government realized that we have to have social cohesion to not to have more bombing and I apply for Le Liaison Joyeuse and it begins like that because one of my work is putting people together, then it's social cohesion. And we are working like till 10 years and it begins like that because I apply, but it's it's what what I was doing before also that is just I have job the money from the government Brussellois.

SPEAKER_03 18:07

I see. And what do you notice in these 10 years of Liaison Jouyuse? What do you what did you notice? What I noticed something that really impressed you in these ten years?

SPEAKER_01 18:19

Yes, the chain uh changing of um the the problematic of the people. Now we are speaking a lot about last year, for example, a lot about the problematic of uh finding a house to live, poverty, people without paper, increase, uh depression, and it increased. It was not as as hard in the beginning. And now I'm sure I'm going to begin uh uh in the end of March and we are going to face the war. Then they are going to speak about the war. They are afraid, people are afraid about war, about also the the price of the the gas and so on. Yes. The people are scared, but the place of Les Liaison Joyeuse it's trying to I can't solve the economic problems of those. Uh I can no I can't solve also the health problem of the society. I can't solve this, but I try to do my best than the people when this when they finish the process, they are happier than in the beginning. And not only happier, but stronger also. Then they can recover their self-esteem, they increase their self-esteem, they are recognized, and I think with the process uh they they meet the other people, they can exchange their email address, their phone number, uh and voila for me uh it's a win. Yes, it's a community, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 20:30

You have been listening to Trust the Process, a podcast on socially engaged arts that is part of the Ask Pay Trust the Artist campaign by Culture Action Europe, realized with the support of the Alliance for Social Engaged Arts. If you are a socially engaged practitioner and would like to share your experience, feel free to get in touch. You can find my contact details in the episode description. Before we wrap up, a few credits. I'd like to thank all the artists, curators, and cultural workers who opened up and shared their stories with me. Thanks as well to everyone who supported me and offered advice along the way. Thanks to Kerem Cherikogru, author of the music of this podcast. And finally, a big thanks to you for listening all the way through. See you in the next episode.