Alberto García Sánchez, actor, director and author, has won several awards for his work on women. The content of the feminist cause he defends was delivered to the public, under an air-conditioned marquee at the Palais de la Culture. There was emotion in the air…

Yves-Patrick Loko (Benin)

Standing ovation for a perfect stand-up performance! The small audience in the big top of Abidjan’s Palais de la Culture, initially stunned, was swept away by the content of the message conveyed. It was in Montreal, Quebec, that author Alberto Garcia Sanchez was asked to do a show about women. « At first, I panicked a lot, because talking about women when I’m not a woman put me in a rather awkward position, » confides the director at the end of « Elle est mon genre ».

« The text had to be consistent with the theme, » says Alberto Garcia Sanchez. So the Catalan-born author did a lot of writing, threw paper into the garbage can, and went back to find his scraps among the garbage, to finalize the story. And the story is that of women who are mistreated, martyred, poorly paid, unable to rise to positions of responsibility despite their skills. « It’s a grave injustice, » says Alberto Garcia, who regrets that feminicide continues. The number of women murdered by their husbands exceeds that of women victims of terrorism, according to the author, who still remembers the ETA attacks in Spain, the country of his birth. Alberto Garcia Sanchez is not just a feminist. He admits to fighting as a humanist against the violence in Palestine and the killing of blacks in the United States.

Role reversal…

« Elle est mon genre » (She’s my gender) is a performance that begins with a man’s experience of being a woman. One morning, the storyteller wakes up in his wife’s body. In the rest of the tale, comedian Sanchez takes a « funny and light-hearted » approach to the difficult question of women’s rights in the West, where everyone still thinks they know the subject perfectly well. « Elle est mon genre » is a series of questions about the status of women in Europe and other parts of the world.