Felwine Sarr

Thirty years after it was first performed, the South African visual artist William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company breathe new life into their Faustus in Africa! Behind its nostalgia-inspired aesthetic, this irreverent reinterpretation of Goethe is as relevant as ever.

Pursuing the collaboration they began in 2023, Jérôme Bel, Jolente De Keersmaeker and Estelle Zhong Mengual bring Baptiste Morizot 's thoughts to the stage in order to ask questions about our place in the living world. Together, they conjure up an account or story that is told to a child by a female philosopher. The ancestral worlds it evokes set up the possibility of reinventing the present one.

In this piece presented in the heart of the Louvre as part of the 2023 Festival d’Automne, Jérôme Bel and Estelle Zhong Mengual take us on a guided visit via choreographies which are the living proof of to what extent dance is a domain not just reserved to humanity. They experience, through action, the idea that the body is the means for a shift by the human being towards other life forms.

The encounter between the actress Valérie Dréville and Nacera Belaza was an obvious choice. For a long time, the choreographer has been exploring the grey area in which the "junction point" between speech and the language that makes the body move is located. Valérie Dréville proved to be a partner equally as inhabited by the power of the imagination and strength of interior life. 

Twenty years after his first invitation to the Festival d'Automne, Christoph Marthaler brings six performers of different nationalities to a summit meeting. Drawing upon a mixture of humour, music and subversion, he crafts a piece of theatre in which humans sing, get lost and sometimes find what they were not looking for.

Bouchra Khalili is the visual arts guest at the 2025 edition of the Festival d'Automne. Born in 1975 in Casablanca, she lives in Vienna, Austria and works in an itinerant manner. For more than twenty years, she has been producing rigorously conceived works that function as visual and discursive hypotheses, and which take into account the contemporary issues of art and the world. Her work seeks to overturn geographies, narratives and official histories in order to restore depth and precision to reality and its protagonists. Bringing together recent works and new productions, her project entitled Astérismes (Fig. 1 à 3) takes to three theatre stages its exploration of the links between the representation of long-lost stories, performance art and moving images.

Pascal Rambert, a major author and director of his generation, finds himself once again in the company of his faithful companions in an ambitious fresco dealing with the passage of time and family ties. Intended as a trilogy spanning five years, it explores what is left behind by our commitments and ruptures.

In this seasonal opus with its thought-provoking title, à l’ombre d’un vaste détail, hors tempête, Christian Rizzo once again casts us under the spell of an organic dance form. He draws up an onstage cartography made up of choreographic fragments, and details. In the company of long-standing accomplices and newcomers, the choreographer renders the invisible visible.

In Bruits Marrons, meaning ‘Brown Noises’, Calixto Neto enters into a dialogue with Julius Eastman and translates one of the African-American musician's hits, Evil Ni**er, into the body. Accompanied by six dancers, the Brazilian choreographer brings this percussive, radical and highly premonitory work up to date.

Alice Diop first came across the prose poem by Robin Coste during an artist’s residency in New York. She then turned her attentions to it in 2023 as part of her Carte Blanche at the Festival d'Automne. Indeed, the text made such an impact on her that she decided to bring it to the stage. In it, the female narrator draws up an art history-related epic which goes in search of the ignored, objectified bodies of Black women.

Following on from Romances inciertos, another Orlando, Nina Laisné and François Chaignaud extend their utopic fusion of dance and music based on South American repertoires. In the company of the Argentinian singer Nadia Larcher, they compose a cosmogonic universe in which voices resonate with the breathy sound of the sackbut and zapateo rhythms. 

The author, composer and director Joris Lacoste brings us a show blending pop with the liturgical. It maps out the contours of a new cult in which nine officiants sing, dance and speak. This ritual of a highly unusual kind is the basis of a very unique show.

The outrageous challenge taken up by Marie-Pierre Brébant and François Chaignaud is to perform the complete musical works of Hildegard von Bingen. Like two figures from another era, they invite us to a take a plunge – both vocally and physically. Within this corpus, each note, each movement opens up access to new perception-based worlds.