Two years after the Portrait dedicated to him, Trajal Harrell draws upon the intense years of his Tokyo studio in order to further his dialogue with the experimental dance of Japanese artist Tatsumi Hijikata. In the collection, the American choreographer's propensity for undermining major forms with a minor approach finds a new level of accomplishment.

In September 2023, Mathis, a 9-year-old schoolboy near Charleroi, was subjected to racist insults from his classmates. He reacts angrily and, considering the situation beyond their control, the school decides to call the police. On arriving at the school, his mother, Rita, is greeted with her son being pinned to the ground by a police officer.

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.

Brazilian choreographer Lia Rodrigues returns with Borda, a new piece that marks and celebrates the 35th anniversary of the Lia Rodrigues Companhia de Danças, a company that set up its home in the Maré favela in Rio de Janeiro in 2004. 

Lygia Pape, an emblematic figure of the Brazilian avant-garde, has made a lasting impact on the history of art with a body of work which, firmly rooted in social realities, combines performance, participation and sensory exploration. For the opening of the Festival d'Automne, one of her earliest collective experiences invites passers-by to plunge into the artist's audacious universe.

For the past four years, the Festival d'Automne opens its program to artists or collectives, making a gesture both artistic and policy. The Carte Blanche becomes a field of experimentation, conducive to crossing of aesthetics, the circulation of ideas and the public. 
For three weeks, the Festival invites the Casa do Povo, a unique Brazilian art center, to invest the Maison des Métallos in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. On this occasion, the Festival d'Automne experiments with new forms of conviviality, and inaugurates for the first time a HQ, open to upheavals and collective reinvention.

In line with Laurène Marx's pared-down theatre, Jag stands alone in front of a microphone separating her from the audience and delivers a stand-up act tinged with sadness. She tells of her return to the environment she originates from, the white working class population of Isère.

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”.

A group of people gather around a table for one last meal. One of them announces their imminent death. Taking its inspiration from the Last Supper, the MEXA collective invites the audience of the Carte Blanche Casa do Povo to a banquet performance, a piece which looks into the memory of the deceased and the need to tell their stories.

Following on from Reconstitution : Le Procès de Bobigny and Rituel 4 : Le Grand Débat, Émilie Rousset furthers her exploration of our contemporary archives by examining encounters with lawyers and litigants in Europe.

Filmmakers and artists, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige explore photography, installations and video. In this performance, they plunge us into the dizzying history of the Nahr el Bared camp, in which the remains of a vanished Roman city reappeared. It reveals a past forgotten by wars and time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For many years, Ellen Fullman has been walking between long, tuned strings, rubbing her resin-coated fingers along them to bow-like effect. The intensity of this contact with her hands enables her to feel their minutest vibrations and to summon up an infinite range of notes from within the realms of sound. In collaboration with the strings of the JACK Quartet and the electronic music of Konrad Sprenger, this unique instrument also forms part of the installation.

For many years, Ellen Fullman has been walking between long, tuned strings, rubbing her resin-coated fingers along them to bow-like effect. The intensity of this contact with her hands enables her to feel their minutest vibrations and to summon up an infinite range of notes from within the realms of sound. In collaboration with the strings of the JACK Quartet and the electronic music of Konrad Sprenger, this unique instrument also forms part of the installation.

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. 

Following on from the resounding success of One Song presented at the Festival in 2023, the multi-faceted artist Miet Warlop returns with INHALE DELIRIUM EXHALE, a powerful new tour de force. In an empty space, a wave rises and breaks, transforming a simple idea into an extraordinary experience. 

The two pieces Bellows and High & Low are the combined effort of four musicians. Specially made for the Saint-Eustache church, this in situ experience of sound treats our ears to resonances of a unique kind. Waves of sound fill the playing space and acquire shapes of their own, transforming the nave, chapels and vaults into instruments, on a grand scale.

It is a place, a relationship, and turmoil, all in one. Striding up and down the parterre, which refers to the pit, a place where passions and impulses, constraints and freedoms are played out, Volmir Cordeiro continues his investigation of alternative spaces and social links. Accompanied by four rowdy dancers, he draws a subversive energy from out of the joy of the carnival.

Choreographer Dorothée Munyaneza’s piece Version(s) draws up an encounter between men, in which the poet and boxer Christian Nka, accompanied by musician Ben LaMar Gay looks into his career and ambivalent relationship with violence. Combining dance, text and live music, she puts together a hybrid space, which is both portrait and celebration.

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.

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.

A major choreographer on the international contemporary scene, whose jagged, powerful writing has left its mark on major stages, Tânia Carvalho undertakes a tribute to Pierre Boulez as the basis for a spectacular walkabout with three entry points: dance, music and the museum. The piece, the fruit of an unprecedented joint-project between the Lyon Biennale and the Festival d'Automne, weaves a vibrant dialogue between the arts and the city.

"Make waves for me," was what Éliane Radigue asked each of the musicians of Occam Océan I to do. This free-flowing work which relies upon a subtle mastery of each sound exerts deep fascination on behalf of its listeners. In counterpoint, François J. Bonnet’s piece Orbes reaches out to a celestial vault where, due to the force of gravity, the stars attract each other.

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.

Deliberately not shying away from emotion, DameChevaliers immerses itself in Monique Wittig's The Straight Mind, with a voice and sound firmly anchored in the future. Via shifting forms and formats, the collective endeavours to support the work of activists, and explore the emotions that stem from collective political action.

Faustin Linyekula, a central figure on the Congolese artistic scene joins forces with composer and filmmaker Franck Moka in order to continue artistic creation in a country in the grip of chaos. Drawing upon live music and cinema, Profanations is an urgent show. It pits poetry against destruction, and life-giving energy against the powers of death. 

Director Wichaya Artamat, a major figure on the Thai theatre scene, returns this year with The Dead Still Riot, a sound-based new work interweaving tales of insurrection and violence through the ages. Six stories of ghosts from the past take us on a political journey across France and Thailand.

Is Paris a hospitable city? By hosting artists in residence and the co-construction of an exhibition, this is the question that the Cité Internationale des Arts and Scénos Urbaines will be asking. In and around this place of residence located in the centre of Paris and very much at the heart of contemporary urban issues, they will be investigating, through multidisciplinary and speculative gestures, the future of the city and the place of artists within it.

The performance piece Organon, a collaboration between choreographer Noé Soulier and artist Tarek Atoui, brings us a bold reconfiguration of the relationship between performative bodies, space and sounds. 

How can we give visibility to a case that has ended in a non-lieu, or “dismissal”? Ten years after the death of Rémi Fraisse during a demonstration against the Sivens dam, director Olivier Coulon-Jablonka and filmmaker Sima Khatami use theatre as a place in which to question democracy.

How can you find your place in a world flooded with information and digital fragments that disappear from one second to the next? At the crossroads between performance, stand-up, and a dialogue between technology and existential reflection, Vimala Pons once again questions the contemporary world by means of a deftly mischievous ballet, set to the music of Rebeka Warrior and Tsirihaka Harrivel.
 

With its directness and an aesthetic drawing upon that of auto-fictional performance art, Laurène Marx exposes the reality of gender transitions in France. Alone on stage, she performs her own text, mixing theatre and stand-up tinged with sadness. The piece denounces the violence and discrimination experienced by transgender individuals.

Following on from Atlas / the Mountain presented in 2024, Radouan Mriziga continues his cycle dedicated to the mountains, the desert and the sea. In a world ruled by human ambition and technology, these wild spaces defy all attempts to be tamed. Magec / the Desert rethinks our relationship with nature and reveals the wisdom of arid expanses.

The Nikel ensemble, with its blend of traditional and modern-day instruments, and Noa Frenkel, a versatile artist whose voice excels in both the Renaissance repertoire and that of contemporary creation, gives voice to bodies of different kinds. Fantasy rubs shoulders with the fluid or the organic, calling upon our senses. We are reminded that the eyes, skin and palate listen as much as the ears do.

The artist Fanny de Chaillé turns the stage into a place in which ideas circulate, and where bodies become the vehicle for thought. In the company of a troupe of young actors, she dissects theatre and its history. In doing so, she investigates the power of acting itself, and its roots in the here and now of onstage performance.  

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.

Alone on stage, Maria Hassabi stands very close to its edge, in a theatre space that condenses the audience’s attention on bodies. With a slowness verging on immobility, the artist embodies a succession of images, ranging from the iconic to those of a more diffuse kind. In doing so, she presents herself in full view, in all her strength and vulnerability.

People say that Girinshuti wanders around under the influence of a strange mental illness, confronted by cows, central figures of the Rwandan landscape. Cedric Mizero brings us a performative installation which interweaves fictional narrative with childhood reminiscences. 

Four female composers, take up, sixty years later, the utopic quest for continuity between the so-called popular arts and the so-called learned arts, as expressed in Luciano Berio's Folk Songs. In order to do so, they turn their attentions to sound of an impure nature, raw impulses and the sensations brought on by a tremor.

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.

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.

The latest production by the Catalan company El Conde de Torrefiel invites us to close our eyes in order to better open them. It unveils a space in which the audience's imagination encounters the virtuosity of this extraordinary creative duo.

In Beautiful Trouble, devised for and with the JACK Quartet, Natacha Diels does away with the dividing line between life and the work itself, electrifies the saturation of the times we live in and plays around with the hypnotic omnipresence of images. At the crossroads between performance art and installation, this chamber opera for the eyes and ears draws upon text, gesture, electronics and video in order to probe our most vivid emotions.

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.

Its plans drawn up in the 1930s by Le Corbusier, a so-called Cité Radieuse, named Obus, was to be built around an eighteen kilometre-long block of flats in Algiers. The project never actually saw the light of day, but it is this dystopian city, superimposed on reality, that provides the setting for Superstructure by Sonia Chiambretto and Hubert Colas.

After the powerful impact of Yoroboshi: The Weakling presented at the Festival in 2024, playwright and director Satoko Ichihara examines the taboos and sexual contradictions of Japanese society in a bold and subtle way. In her latest work, KITTY, she dreams up a society populated by white cats, a parallel universe frighteningly close to our own.

Nadia Beugré undertakes a solitary journey to Yikakou, her childhood village in the Ivory Coast that has since disappeared, its so-called cursed lands being overrun by the forest. In this new piece, ten years after Quartiers libres, her first solo piece to be presented at the Festival d'Automne, she mixes collective memory with those of an intimate kind.

Philippe Quesne further his thoughts into the place of art in our daily lives in the company of four performers and guests. In this new piece, inventions of the musical and the visual arts-based kind respond to the circumvolutions of Laura Vazquez's highly original poems. 

In this latest creation by American director Faye Driscoll, she confronts us, to dizzying effect, with a sensory whirlwind. Weathering choreographs our bonds of reciprocity and seals a destiny which is of a necessarily common nature.

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. 

Fleeing to her country, where her father and fiancée await her, a female soldier crosses paths with the devil. Gaëlle Bourges reworks the drama by Stravinsky and Ramuz in a solo with two dolls, set to an electro-disco original soundtrack. In a tactful way, La petite soldate poses questions to people of all ages about the place of art in our lives, the impact of war, our relationship to ethics and happiness.
 

Lorraine de Sagazan confronts the undying subject of love with that of the era in which we live. Do we love today in the same way that we used to love twenty years ago? And what about a hundred years ago? What do we know about the younger generations? And what can theatre do in response to the pain of relationships?

On a street corner, when a life is upended and the sky loses its bearings: Robyn Orlin’s seminal solo, originally created in New York inside a cardboard box, is now revived by a performer whose own journey brings a new perspective to the work. Following revivals with Nadia Beugré in 2022 at the Festival d’Automne and with Marta Izquierdo Munoz in 2024 at La Place de la Danse, Robyn Orlin entrusts the interpretation in 2025 to Volmir Cordeiro.

The performance piece The present is not enough, directed by Silvia Calderoni and Ilenia Caleo, deals with the utopia of the body. The recumbent, sinuous, and twisted onstage bodies flirt and are flirted with, exploring forms of unbridled intimacy. In doing so, they create an opening on new modalities of relationships.

One's own room inside Kabul is a visual and sound-based work by Caroline Gillet and Kubra Khademi, offering a sensory immersion in an Afghan living room. The audience follows the thoughts of Raha (Sumaia Sediqi), a young woman cut off from the world in the wake of the Taliban takeover.

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.

After tackling sexual and gender-based violence, in her new work The Brotherhood, Carolina Bianchi turns to the issue of so-called boys clubs in the world of art and theatre. How does this male solidarity shield perpetrators of sexual assault? What is the influence of these power structures on artistic creation?

After immersing herself in the forests with Αγρίμι (Fauve), choreographer Lenio Kaklea now lifts her eyes towards the sky, thereby continuing the ecological focus that has characterised her writing since 2022. But Les oiseaux (The Birds) does not idealize these air-born beings in any way. Instead, the septet accompanied by a non-living bird inivtes us to cast our eyes beyond our overly human gaze.

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. 

In our modern-day existences, finding ourselves so constantly under the presence of lights has meant that we have lost all sense of the dark and darkness. Georg Friedrich Haas draws upon this observation In iij Noct, a string quartet performed in absolute darkness. Enveloping us with sound, it results in our experience of time being overturned, as well as the rhythms of our body, and our relationship with others and listening.

In Pétrole, Sylvain Creuzevault tackles one of Pasolini's most ambitious projects. Via a text which has much in common with his brand of theatre – fragmentary and cascade-like, burlesque and spine-chilling – he continues his exploration into the foundations of our society.

The brief, infinitive the title of this latest piece by Rachid Ouramdane, co-director of the Centre choréographique national de Grenoble, gives us an idea of the project’s guiding sense of purity and sparseness. We are presented with a white stage set, cast shadows, and two dancers, Lora Juodkaite and Annie Hanauer. On it, the two dancers create a torsion which is as physical as it is perceptive of their image - simultaneously offsetting the course of the movement and the way it is seen.

On the banks of the Quai Branly, a place where art carries with it the collective memory of forgotten peoples, the Mapa Teatro collective presents a performance in collaboration with the Nukak community, from the Colombian Amazon. Setting up a dialogue between archives, narratives and visual installation, they give voice to the resistance and memory of the last nomadic Colombian people.

With its blend of seemingly unrelated text, music and sounds, reflecting different facets of the history of today’s world, what legacy does Luciano Berio's virtuoso piece Sinfonia, one of the major works of the 1960s, leave behind? And what resonances can Icelandic composer Bára Gísladóttir extract from it now?

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. 

In the vast Licht (Light) cycle, to which Karlheinz Stockhausen devoted twenty-five years of his life, Monday is the day of Eve. The work, a sumptuous and poetic "musical ceremony in reverence to the mother", celebrates fertility, childbirth and the perpetual rebirth of humanity, as well as the child and the constantly-renewed beauty of the universe.

The meeting between Marlene Monteiro Freitas and Israel Galván feels inevitable, albeit belated. An invisible thread seems to connect the Cape Verdean choreographer and the Sevillian bailaor, bringing them together for a unique project. Face to face, they develop a new and immediate form of communication: a moment of pure joy and humour, an animated conversation based solely on the language of the body.

Is it a concert for six moving bodies? Or a dance for six voices? Alma Söderberg's latest work extends her research into the interlocking of rhythmic patterns with the invention of gestures and vocal melodies. On stage, six performers compose, sing, and move around as though they were a multitude of different frequencies oscillating in space, vibrating together in a quest for harmony.

La gran mentira de la muerte (The Big Lie of Death) is a sound-based and cinematographic installation that explores the figure of Carmen via interplay between the performative worlds of flamenco and bullfighting. In resonance with Bizet's opera, these practices evoke death and involve the audience, giving rise to a form of tension between ritual and the violent traditions of cinema.

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.

 
What are the new politics of love? What is the extent of transgression and politics that the act of love necessarily involves? Following on from Absalon, Absalon!, this new piece by Séverine Chavrier, entitled Occupations, or “formerly”, looks into intimacy and female desire.

In a context of a crisis of all that is common to us, in which collective physical and poetic experiences are increasingly rare, Ivana Müller invites us to rediscover the taste for doing things together. The aim of this piece is to build a place of care, attention to others and relationships.

A world-renowned sound and visual artist, Ryoji Ikeda combines performance art, video installations and electronic music. Since the 2000s, he has also been composing for acoustic instruments. This first concert presents two works, each made up of several pieces, and gives us the opportunity to discover a universe of his in which electricity has been cast aside.

This second concert dedicated to the acoustic work of the digital virtuoso Ryoji Ikeda, invites audiences to three unique listening experiences. Ten percussionists coordinate with each other to choreographic-like effect, as though they were the different parts of a same instrument. The concert also features a choir piece, a first for the composer, and a new work for the Philharmonie de Paris organ.

For the fourth new work in the collection of contemporary performances in conjunction with the Louvre Museum and the Festival d'Automne, Nacera Belaza presents Les Ombres. The piece will be taking over two of the museum spaces in the recently reopened and newly reopened Galerie des Cinq Continents, and set up a dialogue with the works from the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac.

In a ritual-like performance piece, Brazilian director and researcher Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha uses the chemical-based processes of photographic development in order to bring to light the mercury contamination of the Tapajós River.

Born into deeply traditional families with high expectations of them, Israel Galván and Mohamed El Khatib had to adopt a variety of tactics with regards to their heritage in order to carve their own path in the world of artistic creation. Making use of their bodies as living archives, the duo of artists joins forces in the making of a "documentary dance" in which, in the shadow of their respective father figures, the intimate and the political become inextricably linked.

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.

How can we work on violence? How can we put into perspective, stage and retell it? How can we tear it to pieces? The purpose of this two day-long series of encounters, put together by the philosopher Elsa Dorlin, will be to update what critiques of violence teach us and to make an inventory of the various weapons of violence collected.

At sunset on Gulpiyuri Beach, after a violent argument between two male lovers, a ghost named Analphabet appears above the sea. By means of its haunting prose, this ghost heals toxic relationships and casts light upon cruising spots.

In Nina, the Fanny & Alexander company investigates, in a blend of music and performance, the human voice, via the technique of heterodirection. The soprano Claron McFadden embodies the mythical figure of Nina Simone, and conveys the unique energy of this individual who set out to be "the first black pianist".

Two years after the Focus devoted to them at the Festival d'Automne, Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg conjure up an open-ended world populated by avatars. By means of identical faces and pre-recorded voices, the same traumatic memories are played out over and over again.

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.

What unites the two choreographers Nacera Belaza and Katerina Andreo is an undying urge to dance. In a diptych conceived for the Ballet de l'Opéra de Lyon performers, they respond to each other in two new works bringing together multiple resonances.

In his new latest piece, Joël Pommerat delves deep into the mysteries of childhood. In fairy tale-like manner, he sets up an encounter between two young girls as they prepare to confront the ways of the real world and stand up against the authority of adults. Shifting between fantasy and reality, they struggle to preserve the link between them in the face of the overriding norms.

"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.