her(e) Dalilla Hermans & NTGent

Her(e) is based on long conversations with black female artists, actresses and activists. On that basis, Hermans wrote a play about their lives in Belgium. About challenges and hope, work and theatre, families and sisterhood. A political and intimate evening. 

Dalilla Hermans, author of 'Brief aan Cooper en de wereld', 'Zwart', 'Brown Girl Magic', 'Black-Out'  and columnist at De Standaard, researched for her(e) her own experience in recent years in books and columns. For her first theater piece, she wanted to capture, beyond her own view, the special sisterhood that exists among black women.

Together with Abigail Abraham she drew up a guest list of inspiring black women in Flanders and Brussels and invited them for a 24-hour stay at Villa Hellebosch. No less than 31 women (actresses, singers, illustrators, writers, social workers, poets, dancers), from their early twenties to their fifties, came together.

(read more below the video)

What happened that weekend was magical. It went far beyond beauty, far beyond laughter, far beyond hips all dancing to the beat, far beyond eating and catching up together. None of these women will ever be quite the same after this weekend. Everything was put on the table: traumas they didn't even know they had, joy too, intense joy and a deep sense of the need to come together, share and purvey self-love from the natural connection with each other.

Based on audio, video and photographic material from this special stay, Dalilla Hermans wrote her(e). Abigail Abraham is on stage. Not a monologue, but a dialogue. Between black women. Between black women and the white gaze on them.