FURTHER AFIELD

Directed by Muriel Imbach, Le nom des choses stages five performers in a poetic, playful investigation of language through a child’s gaze. Against a cloud of black confetti, the ensemble deconstructs and reshapes words, renaming objects to metamorphose realities. Combining theatre and philosophy, the piece mixes humor and lyricism to examine how language constructs and transforms the world, offering a gentle yet political reflection on imagination, naming and collective emancipation.

In French.

FURTHER AFIELD

Twenty years after the album that brought him to wider attention, Abd Al Malik revisits Gibraltar in a musical performance that probes questions of identity through poetry, wisdom and sincerity. Presented by Les visiteurs du soir, the staging brings together an ensemble of musicians and a dancer to reinterpret the album’s tracks with intimate arrangements and choreographic accents. The result is a contemplative and lyrical evening that examines belonging, memory and cultural dialogue.

In French.

FURTHER AFIELD

Choreographer Po‑Cheng Tsai creates physically bold, poetic and visually striking works. After Floating Flowers (2022) and Alice (2024), Crack takes inspiration from melting glaciers to explore contemporary solitude and the slow disintegration of relationships. Combining traditional Asian movement, jazz, martial arts and hip hop, Tsai stages 13 virtuoso dancers in a pared‑down scenography and immersive sound design. Communions, suspensions, tremors and fractures trace a hypnotic yet urgent choreography where the body becomes a fragile mirror of our world.

FURTHER AFIELD

Opium is an immersive, dreamlike performance by the company 32 Novembre that unsettles the boundary between reality and illusion. In small groups audiences are guided from chamber to chamber through a sensory, experiential path where mentalism, fakirism, corporeal magic, telekinesis and visual arts combine. The piece deploys a plural magic that mixes subtle theatrical craft and tactile spectacle, culminating in a shared collective hallucination.

In French.

FURTHER AFIELD

Xavier Machault leads Pelouse, the rock side of his work, alongside Quentin Biardeau and Martin Debisschop. Their music wraps feverish saxophones, dense synths and thick basses around sensitive texts that shift between intimate, political, surreal and poetic. With mordant, offbeat humour, Pelouse strips rock and chanson to their raw core. For the group’s tenth anniversary the repertoire is enlarged: an eight-piece ensemble revisits the trio’s songs, blending contemporary music and jazz while retaining a raw, rock composition and lyrical intensity.

FURTHER AFIELD

After Désobéir and La Tendresse, Julie Bérès continues to explore identity through the prism of civil disobedience in Épopées. Young men and women from Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, Israel and Palestine bear witness through dance, song and music; their artistic practices become sources of resilience and defiance. Between gravity and humour, truth and fiction, the piece weaves intimate testimony and political urgency into a sensitive theatre where collective vitality reshapes perceptions.