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.

Chinese artist Tianzhuo Chen and Indonesian performer Siko Setyanto present Ocean Cage, a performative installation envisaged as a cry that rings out over the centuries, between struggle, ritual and quest for redemption.

With its title which is by no means paradoxical, Silence is a concert by Lucie Antunes set to a choreography by Mathilde Monnier. The relationship with the music is the foundation for this multi-sensorial new work. The bodies respond to the rhythm as if it were a calling of some sort. And in doing so, silence becomes a score set into movement.

The CEO of a major petrochemical group lives with his daughter, Ami, in his luxury bunker. He directs his empire, with neural implants inside his head, whilst Ami has, for several days now, fallen into complete silence. Bunker pinpoints what is at the source of poems and poetry, that of the encounter between spoken word and silence.

GANESH VERSUS THE THIRD REICH, a fable of a droll and moving kind, interweaves two narratives in order to prompt us to examine our perceptions of theatre and handicap. In it, the elephant-headed god travels through Nazi Germany, while the performers ask themselves questions about the pertinence of telling this story. 

How can long-lost memories be brought to the surface in bodies from today’s world? With Flaming Creatures, Latifa Laâbissi and Walid Ben Selim explore common ground of an intimate kind. Calling upon dance and music, songs from Morocco filter into the present and reawaken powerful, unruly elements of the imagination.