La Niaque

“Niaque” is slang for a fighting instinct. It’s what helped Chad Chenouga survive an extended stay in collective foster care to go on to a career as a filmmaker. In the autobiographical monologue he directs and performs, la niaque is also the irrepressible energy that gives hope to the story of his protagonist Nassim and the other “enfants de la DASS” (child-wards of the Département des Affaires sanitaires et sociales) with whom he lives in a foyer in Fontenay-aux-Roses. Among these “cas sociaux” (social cases) as such children might be more pejoratively referred to, Nassim stands apart, however: a good student, curious, easy-going, he looks with the same equanimity at mates La Savate, Liesse, Malek and Prosper, Africans and Rebeus (backslang for beurs, or French-born North Africans) like himself, as he does at the “éducs” (éducateurs / social workers) who try to strike a balance between their reputations as “distributeurs de baffes” (a little too ready to use their fists in a conflict) and their role as foster parents. A year in their company exposes Nassim to much of what he already knows, as the orphan of a broken marriage, preferring the street to a too-volatile home, but also offers his first experiences with love and a chance to start over.

In his simple, forthright piece, Chenouga captures the best and the worst of a system endowed with considerable means for raising at-risk children (a highlight in the show is when Nassim and pals are taken to receive their monthly stipend of 300 euros, which they promptly blow on counterfeit D&G jeans and Ray-Bans at the Puces de Clignancourt), yet handcuffed by lingering racism and the French state’s weak promise of an ascenseur social to equal rights and opportunities for all. Like the suspicious fire in the director’s office that destroys all their files, these adolescents burn with an incandescent desire to be acknowledged and to have their say, a feeling translated on stage by two hip-hop/Krump dancers who punctuate Nassim’s narration with their repetitive, staccato gestures that hover between collapse and control like a spinning top in the moment it starts to wobble. Nassim’s struggle is not so much with his mother’s addiction, his father’s disappearance or the suicides and murders that punctuate his year at the foyer, but rather with the feeling of relief he discovers to be free of an unbearable personal history and to be at ease with himself in the new life that the foyer and a change of lycée provide.

Chenouga tells his story in the slang of the streets, the language of his characters, who nevertheless grapple, like Nassim, with the codes and forms of standard French. The dual registers speak in plain terms the distance that separates mainstream French society from its disenfranchised youth, whether they live in foyers or HLMs. Nassim’s “niaque” or desire to shake off that status creates a vibrant piece of theater that is never self-pitying but rather genially combative. Chenouga and dancers Wrecker and Romuald Brizolier/Migue Ortega (in alternating performances) use impressive restraint to tell a story that more usually leads to a police record, with salutary laughter and an exemplary will to live.

To February 12, Tues-Sat, 9 pm, Sun, 4 pm, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, 7 avenue Pablo Picasso, RER A Nanterre-Préfecture + navette, 12-25 euros, tel: 01.46.14.70.00.

Photo Credit: Pascal Victor