Mathilde Monnier, Lucie Antunes

Expect artistic sparks to fly, as two of the strongest figures of the contemporary choreography scene – France's Mathilde Monnier and Spain's La Ribot – team up for Gustavia, their portrait of an ever-elusive woman. This enthralling face à face, offers us a bitingly ironic view of our world, thanks to a refreshing dash of both insolence and humor.

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.

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 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.

In her first invitation to the Festival d’Automne, the Lisbon-based choreographer Marga Alfeirão uses dance and performance to shape so-called safe spaces. The latter invite the exploration of intimacy and sexuality. LOUNGE looks into rest as an active affirmation of femininity.

Becoming the guide for his own exhibition, Walid Raad returns to the Festival d’Automne and takes us on a stroll from Beirut to Tunis, and from the mountains of Lebanon to Ljubljana. Between missile craters and memory gaps, we gradually abandon the temptation to distinguish what is created from what is found, thereby prompting us to focus on what art and history do to images.

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.