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.

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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.

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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.

FURTHER AFIELD

Created by Guillaume Cayet, Nos empereurs is a decolonial saga that plunges into the white and French presence in Benin from 1895 to today. The play follows Armand Lamarque, a French army captain turned palm-oil planter whose convictions collide with local realities and drive him toward madness. Combining family epic, historical fable and magical realism, Cayet interrogates the legacy of French colonialism and its contemporary survivals. Produced by Compagnie Le désordre des choses and La Comédie de Valence – CDN Drôme-Ardèche.

In French.

FURTHER AFIELD

Birds on a Wire, the duo of Rosemary Standley and Dom La Nena, reimagines timeless songs with intimacy and lightness. Moving from Pink Floyd to Boby Lapointe and from American classics to traditional songs from around the world, their third album Nuées Ardentes returns to the core of their encounter: voice and cello. Their arrangements are at once refined and raw, spare yet rich, blending erudition and tenderness to blur borders and reveal new emotional textures.