Boris Charmatz

After a series of group pieces and collective events, Boris Charmatz explores for the first time, with SOMNOLE (2021), the minimalist form of the solo in a mental and minimalist choreography, accompanied only by a faint breath: a whistled dance that conveys familiar melodies and crystallisations of gestures in slumber.

Following on from SOMNOLE, a whistled solo, suspended on the edge of a pair of lips, presented at the Festival d’Automne in 2021, Boris Charmatz furthers his investigations into the outer reaches of the breath, paving the way for a dance filled with a silence which is inhabited to the full. In Muette, his body seeks to express what language cannot say. The result is a continual flow of affects that rises up to the surface of the face and skin, and which reflects the intrusions from the world outside. 

How can we set in motion the bodies of around one hundred dancers? In order to rise up to this extraordinary, transmission-based challenge, Boris Charmatz conjures up a swarm-like choreography of physiques and voices. Together, they traverse key moments of his work.

In a continuation of his installation The Dead Still Riot presented in 2025, the Thai director Wichaya Artamat calls upon, in a hybrid, fragmentary performance, the ghosts of insurrections from the past, and fertile breeding ground for those to come. In doing so, he imagines the transmission of a memory rooted in revolution across eras and places.

With The Sea is History, Betty Tchomanga furthers her work centred upon living memories of the African diaspora. After centuries of violence, how can it write its own history? In the wake of such widespread dispossession, how can it reclaim itself, its own body?

In the 19th century, a mysterious manuscript is found somewhere in the English countryside. A diary interwoven with poems, it is all that remains of Ester, who died from loving too much. In the shadow of this narrative, this new piece El corazón de Ester (The Heart of Ester) is the confession of a love and the exhaustion it results in.