François Chaignaud, Marie-Pierre Brébant

Choreographer François Chaignaud and beatboxer Aymeric Hainaux weave a physical and musical alchemy in which sound, voice and rhythm intertwine with performative intensity. Fracas × 7 is the continuation of Mirlitons, in its exploration of a unique body and sound-based language.

Nina Laisné and François Chaignaud invite us on a journey into the heart of the art of romance, in the company of a multi-faceted Orlando. Using this musical material and the stories that run through it it as a starting point, they give shape to a piece which intertwines eras and dances. It is a magic lantern in which the androgynous figures of San Miguel and Doncella Guerrera parade before us.

Mirlitons is an encounter between two voices and two bodies, those of choreographer François Chaignaud and beatboxer Aymeric Hainaux. It gives rise to a physical and musical alchemy in which sound, voice and rhythm combine to form an unclassifiable performative intensity. 

The encounter between the Japanese butoh dancer Akaji Maro, master of the strange and the absurd, and the multi-faceted singer and choreographer François Chaignaud turns their duet at the frontiers of different genres into a pagan ritual, a celebration of bodies in all their states. GOLD SHOWER, a mirrored portrait of two unclassifiable figures, transcends differences in which the joy of disruption is played out to the full. 

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. 

With their bodies vacuum-packed into black latex bags borrowed from the world of S&M, the sylphs evoke, by turns, recumbent figures set in stone, cocoons made of some kind of dark-coloured matter or body bags. What unfurls in this piece piece is a perception-based enigma, which deftly slips from ancient statuary into Body Art. This Portrait brings Sylphides back to life, the first mythical piece co-signed by Cecilia Bengolea and François Chaignaud in 2009, performed here in a choral and immersive version.

"Tumer", in Old French, means to dance, stir, or fall backwards. In the company of a collective of singing, dancing, and constantly transforming tumerels, Geoffroy Jourdain and François Chaignaud have concocted a mischievous review. Moving between different eras and genres, from polyphonic singing to variety, it brings this Portrait, and indeed the 2025 edition of the Festival d'Automne, to a close.

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.

In November 2023, the Festival d'Automne hosted an audience encounter with Angela Davis in which reflections on current events in the arts intersected with global political issues. From out of this meeting came the idea of an École du soir “evening school”, in conjunction with the Centre Pompidou and in collaboration with the Senegalese intellectual and economist Felwine Sarr, The different events focus on a central question, that of a “A life in common”.

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.

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.