Boris Charmatz | Terrain

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.

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.

The Egyptian director and playwright Laila Soliman takes an interest in what remains, and confronts the intimate with the collective. Her work takes sorrow as its starting point. With Story of…, she explores the gaping hole left by the death of a child.

Bouchra Ouizguen operates at the threshold, at the point where the body opens itself up to what appears. Movement, permeated by traces and reminiscences, blends with bouts of song, music and silence. Alone onstage, the choreographer searches for a space of freedom, in which disappearance becomes a form of presence.

Josué Mugisha conjures up the idea of artists interrupting the piece as it is being performed in order to demand what its “meaning” is. In the absence of the author, they address the audience by means of dance, poetry, and the imagination. In the political context of Burundi, in which freedom of speech is muzzled and the "tambourinaire" drum player censured, the choreographer and theatre director brings to the stage, after La première danse politique, a second piece, a metaphor for "killing the drum”, a symbol of power. In the midst of a deluge of poetic images, the performers sabotage the representation and turn it into a place of insubordination.

In The Chairs by Jaber Ramezan, the performers move around the stage within an unstable architecture made up of chairs, without ever touching the ground. Each movement involves negotiation between body and chair, as well as gravity. By means of a heightened, mutual attentiveness, balance turns into a practice of caring for one another. Following on from Boundaries of Bodies, the Iranian artist furthers the investigations he has been carrying out over the course of the last fifteen years, at the crossroads between theatre, dance and cinema.

Yassmine Benchrifa explores the transitions that punctuate a life and the transformations which shape an identity. The Moroccan artist discovered hip-hop when she was 12 years old, and was captivated by the expressivity and raw energy of this urban culture. Later on, she was accepted at Nafass, Morocco’s first school of contemporary dance. This first solo, which was nominated at the Taklif entrance exam in Marrakech, was inspired by her story. With writing of a sensitive and instinctive nature, she sheds light upon the successive states of a body swept up in the continuous flow of a lifetime, in which all is transition.

Three years after the success of Les Historiennes, Jeanne Balibar returns with En Sicile, a piece she directs and performs. If, at first, this passage appears idyllic, it becomes the forerunner for disaster, a threnody, or elegy, for our world, confronted, as it is, with a matter of great urgency: how can we abandon ourselves to the present and resist it at the same time?

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.

People Will People You explores the construction, projection and weakening of identity under society’s watchful gaze. Revisiting the spectacular images which have shaped his public image, or figure, Steven Cohen questions the normative effect of the gaze and the fabrication of roles assigned to us.

In 2025, the Festival d’Automne launched an Evening School in partnership with the Centre Pompidou to create an alternative, non-academic space for knowledge-sharing, designed to bring audiences together around a thought-provoking programme where artistic practice is combined with the audience’s experience. Following an inaugural edition conceived with Felwine Sarr, the 2026 Evening School has been conferred to Forensic Architecture. Under the direction of Eyal Weizman, this research agency, composed of investigators from different disciplines, with its base at Goldsmiths, University of London, develops methods of enquiry into state-perpetrated acts of violence, at the crossroads between art, law and journalism. 

How can we rethink artistic creation from the starting point of our affects? Since 2020, Fanny de Chaillé and her performers have been turning towards a language of sensitivity, which does not shy away from love, fear, or tears. And in which music becomes a place of listening and resonance, reaffirming its status as an essential part of writing for the theatre.