Chiquet Mawet

Chiquet Mawet
Born	Michelle Beaujean (1937-01-23)23 January 1937 Verviers, Belgium
Died	4 July 2000(2000-07-04) (aged 63) Liège, Belgium
Occupation(s)	playwright, columnist, activist

Chiquet Mawet (born Michelle Beaujean; 23 January 1937 – 4 July 2000) was a playwright, storyteller, poet, social activist and professor of ethics. Part of the generation between Stalingrad in 1942 and May 1968, Beaujean was fascinated at the age of 20 by the hope of self-managed socialism (Titoism) in Yugoslavia. At 30, she became a pioneer of the anti-nuclear movement in Belgium.

Writing

Poster for The Pope and the Whore.

A playwright, in addition to her texts and articles, Mawet was the author of numerous plays including La Pomme des hommes, Le prince-serpent, and Le Pape et la putain.

• 1990: Piratons Perrault. Funny and incisive recovery of the illustrious Contes de ma mère l'Oye by Charles Perrault. The ogre, Bluebeard, Cinderella, Snow White, Le Petit Poucet, Le Chat botté… all of these characters have lived in everyone's memory. Chiquet Mawet made a point of redistributing the roles conceived three centuries earlier by the famous French writer during the atomic era. And, updated in this way, these characters can reveal unimaginable and scandalous secrets.
• 1994: The Pope and the Whore. Argument: God sends Pope Julius, assisted by his secretary Francis, to a new Mary, better suited to our valley of tears. Maria, a Moscow mother who occasionally works as a prostitute, is the victim of this modern annunciation which will take place at a time when all the social and political orientations which are currently being put in place in the world will converge towards final chaos.

In 1989, she was a founding member of the association Silence, les Dunes! which brought together around ten artists from the Verviers region.

Activism

Mawet's time in the anti-nuclear and green movements brought her into the French anarchist movement, in which she joined Alternative libertaire.

In the 1990s she regularly collaborated with the monthly Alternative Libertaire. She published dozens of texts there. In 1997, she recalls her atypical career in the collective work Le Hasard et la necessity: how I became a libertarian.

After a long illness, Mawet died on 4 July 2000, at the age of 62.

Works

Stage plays

• La véritable histoire de Juliette et Roméo (1988)
• Piratons Perrault! ou L'horrible fin du sapiens: sortie sur le parvis du xxi^e siècle (1990)
• Caius et Umbrella (1990)
• La pomme des hommes (1991)
• La reine des gorilles (1991)
• Le Pape et la Putain (1993)
• Le Prince-Serpent (1994)
• Nuinottenakt (1995)

Contributions to collective works

• Neptune et Jéhovah étaient sur un bateau (1987)
• Joutes internationales (1991)
• Profession de foi (1996)
• Dossier drogues (1996)
• Le Hasard et la nécessité : comment je suis devenu libertaire (1997)
• La Soupière : comme un cheveu sur ou dans la soupe (c'est selon) (1998)
• Solo (1998)
• Nature morte, morte nature (1999)

Publications

• Chiquet Mawet, Médiathèque des territoires de la mémoire
• Réflexions sur le théâtre : lettre à l'acteur inconnu, Alternative libertaire
• Chômeur, pas chien ! Résister, s'organiser !, Alternative libertaire
• Nature humaine : à gauche toute ! Sur la nature de l'homme qui serait d'obéir, Médiathèque des territoires de la mémoire
• Correspondance, Center for Literary and Theatrical Research and Documentation of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation

Bibliography

• Delhalle, Nancy (1997). Le répertoire des auteurs dramatiques contemporains : théâtre belge de langue française. Alternatives théâtrales (in French). Bruxelles: Alternatives théâtrales. pp. 139–140. ISSN 0774-4145.
• Delhalle, Nancy (December 1997). "Authors in the ruins. Parcours arbitraire". Alternatives théâtrales (56): 36–39.

External links

• Performance artworks by Chiquet Mawet at Archives and Literature Museum (Belgium)