What bridges can be made between Harare, Dakar and Paris? What forms of dialogue and exchange can we imagine between these three cities, their history and present? A proposition made to her by the Festival d’Automne, nora chipaumire’s Carte Blanche —renamed as carte noire—has been drawn up as a form of response to these questions. Formerly based in New York, the  choreographer and dancer has close links with each of these metropoles: in Zimbabwe, the country of her birth and in which she founded nhereraHUB, a place of work and reflection which is open to projects of different kinds; in Senegal, where she spent a long period of time working, notably, with the women of the Toubab Dialaw village; and in Paris where several of her works have been presented, the image of which has given her a love of conversation, in the true sense of the word. 
 

With this musical performance, nora chipaumire revisits and develops, alongside five women belonging to the Lébou community from the village of Toubab Dialaw, in Senegal, the score from her piece NOT waiting...devised in 2023 with the choreographer Germaine Acogny. 

Invited for the first time to the Festival d’Automne, Christine Sun Kim is a multi-disciplinary artist working at the crossroads between the visual arts, sign language and music. Taking her inspiration from musical notation and other graphic information systems, she unfurls in the public space an exhibition which combines humour and critical thought. In doing so, she overturns all expectations in relation to the non-auditory and political dimensions of sound.

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.

A blue mat signifies a common space between audience and performer, in which two female dancers give themselves over to a hypnotic score, bringing with it desire, absence, hope and loss. Ewa Dziarnowska, the Polish choreographer based in Berlin, creates a vibrant contact dance which favours connection rather than distance.

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.

“Beauty is secondary” is one of the instructions that appears at the beginning of the fourth movement of the Sonata for Solo Viola, Op. 25 No. 1, by the German composer Paul Hindemith (1895–1963). It could well have been uttered by his compatriot, the Expressionist choreographer Dore Hoyer (1911–1967), creator of the dance cycle Afectos Humanos, on which Pol Pi has been working since 2014.

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.

During her second week in Paris, nora chipaumire invites audiences to a carte noire rendez-vous consisting of an evening of dub. She will be setting up a Zimbabwean shebeen, an unofficial bar tucked away in private homes, a place where people come together in order to invent forms of resistance and insurrection in response to the political powers that be.

What should we do with the bodies of the dead? In Antigone, this question enabled Sophocles to illustrate the limits of political power in the face of the sacred. In his latest work, Alexander Zeldin sheds light upon the atomisation of pain and suffering that characterises the times we live in.

How can we share dance which is of a deeply intimate nature? Masse by Myriam Gourfink, a piece which stems from a meditative practice, explores states of perception and resonance. Originally developed as a solo piece in 2022, here it is reimagined in the form of a duo with France Cartigny. Their relationship becomes a new driving force for the writing. 

The director Maxime Kurvers furthers his research in theatrical anthropology by bringing the actress Yuri Itabashi face-to-face with the ban which prevents her, in accordance with tradition, from performing Okina, a play and ritual originating from nō theatre. As such, this piece is about how, through the power of the imagination, we can embrace what is forbidden to us.

Part concert part performance, in which voice, gesture and sound collide, #punk draws upon nora chipaumire’s founding years in Zimbabwe, as a means of embodying, in the present, punk energy and rebellion.

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?

Un champ brûlé is a reflection on war as cultural inheritance, and on the narratives that make it possible. How can a tradition carry with it and pass on violence which ends up by justifying itself? Onstage, in classical musician attire, Elina Kulikova and Dima Efremov attempt to ward off a double trauma, that of singing in front of an audience, and that of watching their country invade and massacre its neighbour.

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.

Carolina Bianchi unfurls the final chapter of Cadela Força, thereby bringing to a close this multifaceted trilogy. The latter takes the form of a critical exploration of language, the history of art, theatre and authorship in terms of their relationship with sexual violence and patriarchy. Far from drawing any conclusions, the Brazilian playwright opens up new avenues for reflection.

By means of songs from Russian folklore, Elina Kulikova summons, in Un endroit perdu, the second part of her trilogy, centuries of history and a memory marked by violence. This vocal gesture becomes a space for questioning the guilt of belonging to a nation that perpetuates this violence. But going beyond shame, the show investigates identity and the impossibility of purifying yourself of your own culture: “I do not feel shame because I embody it”.

The third part of the Trilogie de la guerre takes on a more active, militant dimension. Une nuit blanche, set to electronic music, takes its inspiration from the accounts of Dima Efremov’s activism, leading to the freeing of numerous political prisoners in Russia. The piece links clandestine spaces of celebration to that of the theatre, as a place of resistance and refuge. What does electronic music enable us to express or set free, in the face of war, repression and the traumas it breeds?

In a theatrical and musical trilogy, Elina Kulikova and Dima Efremov set out to denounce Russia’s war and invasion of Ukraine. In their hands, this gesture becomes the starting point for an investigation of an artistic and deeply personal nature. From its makings to its innermost effects, they explore what it means to belong to a country at war. Turning to references from the Russian repertoire — whether they be classical, folkloric or festive—the show builds up the contours of an ode to resistance and turns the stage into both place of refuge and confrontation.

At the Panthéon, Bouchra Ouizguen devises a swarm-like choreography drawing upon the intense energy of a group of children. In this monumental space, impregnated with history, their mobile, reactive presence shifts the venue’s living memory towards the intensity of a shared present.

With its title which is by no means paradoxical, Silence is a concert by Lucie Antunes set to a choreography by Mathilde Monnier. The relationship with the music is the foundation for this multi-sensorial new work. The bodies respond to the rhythm as if it were a calling of some sort. And in doing so, silence becomes a score set into movement.

What defines us as human beings? This question is the point of departure for Lexikon, the latest production by El Conde de Torrefiel, a work centred upon the following idea: the spoken word as a flow of a vital kind, and creator of worlds. Like an underground current, it is in a constant process of motion and transformation.

A mother and son. Throughout her life, she has done a host of different jobs in order to support the family. He has dedicated his life to theatre. Together, the stage becomes a tool for unfurling their different existences, caught up at the intersection of capitalism inherited violence.

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. 

Song, singing, whether part of the popular tradition, one of Beethoven’s final string quartets, or music from Galicia, permeates the three parts of this programme. Song that does not belong only to the voice, but also with which the instruments react, as well as the different works, in interaction with each other, thereby magnifying a shared collective memory.

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 Paradis plage, Kenza Berrada conjures up a huis clos at the heart of the Moroccan bourgeoisie. Stifled by its code of decorum, the characters cling to the idea of the family, against all odds.

An ode to tenderness. In the company of the Dançando com a Diferença dancers, Bouchra Ouizguen pieces together dance underpinned by singularity. A world which is both joyous and simple—not naive, but necessary—that owes its existence to abandon and the attention we pay to ourselves, those around us and the world.

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.

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.

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.

This second part of the Portrait dedicated to Cassandra Miller associates Dad Goes to the Mountain, a quadriptych to be performed uninterrupted, dedicated to her aged, increasingly forgetful father with the themes of childhood and death. It mirrors the arc of our existences, to which Ravel and Kurtág lend themselves.

Alongside the exhibition Attendre ensemble at the Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, Le Festival d'Automne and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris presents A Fashionable Marriage (1986), a key element in Lubaina Himid’s early work within the British Black Arts Movement. Forty years after it was created, this installation continues to be emblematic in terms of its practice by virtue of its precise articulation between the re-reading of art history—in this instance, the English satirical tradition not unlike that of William Hogarth and from which came the inspiration for the characters—and contemporary commentary on the state of British society.

In the tragedy of our lives, the end is something we know all to well. What we are not familiar with, however, is how it comes about. Sébastien Kheroufi will be presenting the epilogue of his forthcoming new work, La mort du Môme, three weeks prior to its premiere. This performance, Les enfants de la patrie, is a way of letting go of all suspense. What interests him is not that of staging the spectacle of a tragic life, but rather an investigation into the inner workings of misery. 

Christine Sun Kim’s multifaceted practice explores the manner in which sound and language function in society. At the crossroads between written text, systems of visual notation, American sign language (ASL) and video, she deconstructs the social hierarchies of sound and the spoken word.

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.

The sound-based art of Lolo & Sosaku throws the limits of the different artistic disciplines and time into disarray. It makes its way into their confines, giving life to a priori inanimate objects and reveals them: machines, bits of metal welded together, cables, circuits and other discarded elements of industrial material. Each of their performances opens up a space in which the invisible takes shape, as in a ritual.

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.

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.

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.

With Faust, Romeo Castellucci once again tackles one of the founding myths of our Western culture. In it, the Italian director becomes an architect of chaos, a means of embracing, to the full, the contradictions of our contemporary world.

Los Inescalables Alpes, buscando a Currito (The Unclimbable Alps, looking for Currito) is driven by a burning desire to see a person once again. The title and ensuing dance suggest an infinitesimal effort, that of overcoming the impossible. María del Mar Suárez, the Andalucian choreographer also known as La Chachi, conjures up a hybrid and deeply personal flamenco, which respects and deconstructs the tradition whilst introducing elements of krump and punk sensibility at the same time.

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?

Since 2013, Radio Live has been allowing the voices of young people across the world, grappling with the various conflicts of History in the making, to be heard. Le jour d’après continues a new cycle initiated in 2024, in which Aurélie Charon and her artists collective explore the possible reconstruction of cities and dialogues, travelling, on this occasion, to Kyiv and Cairo.

By making music inseparable from life, taking its full measure in relation to its different media, and heightening its artifices like a magician seeking an immediate effect …Simon Steen-Andersen and his perfomer Michael Schmid follow in the footsteps of a major work of modernity.

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.

A picnic, disappearances, and an open, unsolved mystery: the Italian duo DOM- plunge the spectator headlong into the vaporous atmosphere of Picnic at Hanging Rock by Peter Weir. In doing so, they bring up to date, and situate in the present day, its critique of Australia’s colonial bourgeoisie.

Since 2013, Radio Live has been allowing the voices of young people across the world, grappling with the various conflicts of History in the making, to be heard.  Le jour d’après continues a new cycle initiated in 2024, in which Aurélie Charon and her artists collective explore the possible reconstruction of cities and dialogues, travelling, on this occasion, to Kyiv and Cairo.

Heralding the return of the Festival d’Automne to the Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, Lubaina Himid brings us, in collaboration with Magda Stawarska, a unique installation the scale of which is in keeping with the building itself. Encompassing paintings, sound, textiles and engravings, her project links overall history to individual identities based on the universal theme of waiting.

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. 

From the dining hall of an Emmaüs hostel, where he found his father lying dead at the age of 17 years old, Sébastien Kheroufi retraces a story of an intimate, social kind. Between family memories, heritage and the fragmentation of identity, La mort du Môme questions what society takes and what the living leave behind.

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.

Prior to its first performances in 2027, Back to Back Theatre invites audiences to discover the different phases of work behind NEANDERTHAL—Histoire(s) du théâtre VIII by being present during its rehearsals. This ambitious new piece looks into the themes of extinction and cognition.

Following on from SOMNOLE, a whistled solo, suspended on the edge of a pair of lips, presented at the Festival d’Automne in 2021, Boris Charmatz furthers his investigations into the outer reaches of the breath, paving the way for a dance filled with a silence which is inhabited to the full. In Muette, his body seeks to express what language cannot say. The result is a continual flow of affects that rises up to the surface of the face and skin, and which reflects the intrusions from the world outside. 

Drawing upon a newspaper story of an extraordinary kind, that of the appearance on a beach of a man suffering from amnesia, Marcus Lindeen and Marianne Ségol continue their work in the field of documentary theatre. With a mixture of precision and philosophy, they probe into the spoken words that underlie narratives.

The Danish choreographer and dancer Mette Ingvartsen and the Australian drummer and percussionist Will Guthrie have been pursuing their respective creative projects for several years, whilst collaborating remotely. All Around, which premiered at the Festival d’Automne in 2020, is their first joint stage production. 

Filmed by means of a circular mechanism, RADIAL brings us a portrait of a community in motion. It is equally attentive to the collective whole as it is to the individualities of those that compose it. This in situ creation celebrates and brings together different artistic communities from the Paris region.

Tenderness welcomes as many definitions as there are personal experiences of it, and in this piece two performer-choreographers and a performer-musician embark us upon a collective, experimental form of research into this anti-authoritarian motto. It leads to a transformation of ways of being together, but also of the different forms that representation can take.

British vocalist, movement artist and composer of Afro-Caribbean origin, Elaine Mitchener manifests, through the intensity of her presence, voice and gestures, the traces, both past and present, of discrimination and colonial wounds, exposed in all their rawness.

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. 

Irish composer and vocalist, Jennifer Walshe examines what lies beyond the human and the biological, and takes us into the realms of the object and technology, the virtual and artificial intelligence. And also, the automatic, which awakens within us a new form of capacity for action, and remodels our sensations and feelings, body and thought.

Ruth Childs, the Anglo-American choreographer and Cécile Bouffard, the French visual artist turn their attention to our quirks, bodily memory and the remnants of folklore in the contemporary world. Part installation, part performance for three dancers, Such a Devoted Bunch explores the mechanics of devotion and obsession via movement and objects.

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.

Temporary Title, 2026 is a work designed for an exhibition in which spectators come and go at will for the duration of their visit. The performers embody and incorporate a succession of metamorphoses, transforming both their presence and the space, thereby creating diverse ways of being together. 

Two years after L’œil nu, the choreographer Maud Blandel returns to the Festival d’Automne with Same Old Songs, a piece which takes its inspiration from Virginia Woolf. Between rhythmic hallucination and an unstable trio, it is the extension of a pacifist gesture that flies in the face of the inevitability of war, and goes in search, via the body and sound, of other possible futures.

A mixture of solos, duos and trios, collage, mobile, and sound sculpture, Chroma scatters instrumental ensembles, turntables and dozens of music boxes across the space. Listeners are invited to wander around these living and mechanical islands, each a source of limitless perspectives, whilst the Grand Palais in turn shapes the work and makes it unique.

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.

Originally from Buenos Aires, the choreographer and performer Diana Szeinblum turns to Argentinian folklore dances and then deconstructs them. A piece which is both introspective and performative, ADENTRO! delves deep into the inner workings of bodily forms shaped by popular imagination and its gestures.

Those who dance mix with those who sing. Musicality passes through the bodies, carried along by the same vibrations. Un peu pour mon cœur… is a communion rite, and furthers Dalila Belaza’s exploration of the resonances between song, dance and music.

Once upon a time in Seine-Saint-Denis, there was a large community of people that resisted against the violence of a world coming to an end. Rébecca Chaillon brings together onstage a clan of performers who, by means of combining their respective strengths with techniques of survival from the fringes of society and their hybrid beliefs, craft new mythologies that resemble them: strange, plural, and dangerous.

A vast configuration consisting of fifty upright pianos forming a large circle, with an ensemble of twenty-five musicians sat at them, their backs to the audience, who are sat in the middle, 11 000 Saiten (11 000 Strings) is a fresco of a fascinating kind. Georg Friedrich Haas invites us to become enthralled, enveloped by a palette of infinite variety, like a sound-based mirror held up to the entire universe.

The director Jonathan Capdevielle adapts Dialogo con i lettori by Pier Paolo Pasolini, within the unique framework of the Talents Adami Théâtre initiative. Bringing together eight young performers for a condensed period of rehearsals, he creates a hybrid form which fleshes out what society does in troubled times.

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.

Five works, historical or recent, for entering into sound and seemingly immobile and continuous textures—and for experiencing, in an intimate way, rich vibrations and fissions beneath the monochrome surface. Inside the Saint-Eustache church, organ, ensemble and electronics give life to intricate meshes, dissolutions and secret movements.

At the crossroads between urban thriller, social satire and voyeuristic meditation, small metal objects plunges its performers into the perpetual movement of the public space. From within the heart of the crowd, the piece captures all the intensity of a personal drama.

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.

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?

Spanning a host of different disciplines, visual artist and internationally-renowned photographer, Hiroshi Sugimoto furthers his work on the major Japanese traditions by coming back to Noh theatre. Noh Climax, which concentrates on six repertory works, promises to overturn all our space-time points of reference.

Set to music by the Australian trio The Necks, FOOD COURT plunges a woman headlong into the all-too banal horrors of a humiliating experience in the public space. Featuring a cast of three female performers with learning difficulties, the piece transforms into an experience of an intense, unsettling kind.

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.

Following their performance at the Gaîté Lyrique, Lolo & Sosaku take over the Les Chaudronneries, an industrial edifice which was occupied in 2024 for the opening of the Festival d’Automne. Transcending their different states, the materials used in the installation unveil the place itself and inhabit it with a presence.

Sphere / Kurah is an installation in which body, voice and gesture permeate each other. By means of screens, projections and translucent surfaces, images detach themselves from the body and become traces, lights, and glimmers. Within this passage from presence towards fragility, the work attaches itself to forms of survival.

The Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme duo studied the songs and poems of Palestinians in Israeli jails from 1948 until the present day, elevating poetry to that of an act of resistance in response to the curbing of freedom. Prisoners of Love : Until the Sun of Freedom forms part of constantly evolving project that blends multimedia installation and performance.

The Spanish company El Conde de Torrefiel takes over the 7L library, Karl Lagerfeld’s former photography studio, for a site-specific new work. It stages, in this space, matter of a textual, visual and sound-based kind designed as a scenic study for a piece in the making.

This is a concert with much at stake…to reconcile two universes of a thoroughly unique kind, to enter into hypnotic vibrations of sound, to allowing ourselves to be absorbed, body and soul, by its all-pervading presence, and to discover, in an entirely different manner, secular instruments that we thought we knew so well. And then, to listen to their song ring out, via the breath or the effect of the circular motion of a drumstick.

In GLA55, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker returns to American minimalist music and explores, for the first time, the work of Philip Glass. Set to four of the composer’s early works, performed live by the ICTUS ensemble, six dancers push abstraction to the frontier with trance.

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.

Ease, simple pleasures, oral transmission, time in suspension like a lullaby or the stilled surface of a lake, uncluttered, as if reaching out to a veiled, uncertain origin… And of course, the fertile friendship with the Quatuor Bozzini, a favourite of Cassandra Miller, Sarah Davachi and Éliane Radigue, recently passed away. All the above binds together the three serene works in this concert.

Bringing to a close this Carte Blanche and the 2026 edition, nora chipaumire takes over the Fondation Cartier for Contemporary Art and presents gadzi—a Paris chapter. This final piece of new work is a reflection of the extended length of time necessary for a work not only to be installed within a venue, but also to traverse and reconfigure it.

The architect and visual artist Feda Wardak plunges deep into the depths of Afghan struggles by means of an installation of a spectacular natures, inhabited by the dancers of choreographer Saïdo Lehlouh and Deena Abdelwahed’s sound design.

Dear audience,

My name is Jérôme Bel; I am an artist who worked in the field of choreography between 1994 and 2026. Having received public funding for my work, I felt it would be right to give back to all my fellow citizens and beyond some of the performances created in complete artistic freedom.

I therefore conceived a final work entitled Jérôme Bel 1994–2026. It was produced in collaboration with the Centre national de la danse and the Centre Pompidou, and is now part of their permanent collections.