Philippe Quesne

In the wake of disarray, grief and the downward spiral comes rallying cries. Following on from Bless This Mess, the choreographers Katerina Andreou and Mélissa Guex cement their reunion in a duo that is very nearly a concert. In as close proximity to the audience as possible, their infectious energy metamorphoses anger into collective joy.

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.

Past masters in the art of collage and multi-disciplinary montage, The Wooster Group, co-founded and directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, has been a regular guest at the Festival d’Automne since 1999. Always at the forefront of scenographic techincal innovation, the American director is a major figure of the avant-garde, notably with her re-readings of classic texts. 

Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me, by The Wooster Group, with Eric Berryman, directed by Kate Valk, is a celebration of the Black-American tradition of toasts.

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.