CULTURE Matthieu Barbin/Sara Forever for “Bûle Bébé”

A protean artist – dancer, actor, drag queen and activist – Matthieu Barbin, also known under the stage name Sara Forever, came to the attention of the general public during season 2 of Drag Race France, in which he was a finalist.

He has also collaborated with major artists on the contemporary scene, including Boris Charmatz, Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard, Marlène Saldana and Jonathan Drillet. His latest show, Dynasties, toured successfully in theaters across France.

“Brûle ©bé” traces the journey of Alex, who grows up in the Bordeaux suburbs with a mother whose presence shapes his relationship with the world. Then dance emerges, which imposes itself as a necessity, a place where the body seeks its own language. It opens a journey: Alex crosses other environments and refines his artistic gaze. From his hip-hop school to the conservatory, via Paris, classical dance, avant-garde theater and Drag, his journey is built through successive frictions.

At the crossroads of the coming-of-age novel and autofiction, the text tells the story of a young man’s awakening to his queer identity and his creative power. But as emancipation takes place, the break with his original environment becomes more pronounced: society separates him from his family. In the end everything becomes abrasive and incendiary: everything burns, childhood, family, assignments, society, patriarchy. Brûle ébé then asserts itself as a frontally political text, without concession, which says with accuracy and harshness what it sometimes costs to survive elsewhere.

Carried by a strong stylistic bias, the novel alternates between precise naturalism and an increasingly marked drift towards the imagination. A story of metamorphosis where identity is constructed through movement, disorder and transgression. A way of exploring how a transgressive artist is born and built.

How to stay yourself while becoming other, and become other to better find yourself. After a founding and daring journey as a committed artist, drag artist and poetic performer, we discover in Matthieu Barbin a sensitive author, inhabited by a political outlook on our time.

Published by Éditions du Diable Vauvert “Brûle â©bé†, by Matthieu Barbin/Sara Forever is a novel of 336 pages à 21 euros.