In a new one-man show that feels like a conference, the comedian and humorist Océan interrogates the notions of sex and gender. An ambitious, funny, and radical performance to be seen in March at Plateaux Sauvages, in Paris, before a tour across France.
Océan has taken the stage again. For his return to live performance, after notably his web series Intimate Self-Portrait of a Trans Man, the comedian and humorist, already author of The Invisible Lesbian and then of Violent Kittens, has once again chosen the format of the solo show. In The Infiltrator, which he performs until March 20 at Plateaux Sauvages, in Paris, the transmasculine artist offers a kind of conference on trans identity and gender that blends queer humor with militant seriousness in presenting the arguments.
White shirt, suit trousers and bomber jacket: when he steps onto the stage facing the audience, the comedian plays a professor come to present his research on sexual dimorphism. He states his intention: “To talk about cisgender men, and bear witness to what I see and feel now that I have access to their spaces of non-mixity, even if I only glimpse them in fragments…” On the stage, Océan plays with his body and with his body, a material for vivid images, as well as with his voice which has progressively transformed during his transition, as he demonstrates in a hilarious tableau with a vocoder.
“The Lions Are Huge Pedals”
Natural intersex variation, trans identity that has existed since the dawn of time and in all cultures, the animal world far less binary than Darwin thought… From the introduction of this solo show, Océan firmly lays out the basics by bringing the reactionaries to their panicked illiteracy the moment a person does not fit into the Tupperware that society has prepared for them. Pedagogical without being heavy, thanks to a plethora of examples and numerous staging discoveries, this savory first part on the history of sexes and gender establishes a vibe of complicity with the audience.
But Océan has risen again, particularly angry at the “white and bourgeois order” that he attacks in the second segment of the show. The activist no longer bothers with restraint, and denounces in no uncertain terms problematic artworks, men who are rapists or attackers, or the violence of the police. “Frère pote papa” : cis men are indeed the problem, even those who think they have deconstructed themselves, he insists, before mischievously announcing that he has transitioned to the “grand remplacement” of masculinists.
“Of course I am unfair, but always less than patriarchy”, he admits at the end of a journey that, on opening night, had won over the audience. A radical gesture for an audience already won to his cause, The Infiltrator does not seek so much to convince as to shake. And not only with bursts of laughter.
