Presented as a season manifesto, Les Racines du Ciel is a reflective text by Eric Devanthéry that probes the weight of words and collective imaginaries in an accelerated history. It frames the stage as both bulwark and site of shared, engaged human experience, calling to preserve margins against logics of productivity and control. The essay evokes the season’s diverse pieces — from À l’aune to Orlando — and insists on culture as necessity. A transcription and a SoundCloud excerpt accompany the text.

In French.

Directed by Aurélia Lüscher, Au Grand Passage stages a tender and questioning dialogue with her paternal grandmother and the spectral traces that linger among the living. Combining documentary inquiry and poetic dramaturgy, Lüscher conjures the voices of those who engage with the beyond amid a wax and mist décor that blurs visible and invisible. Drawing on readings like Magali Molinié and Vinciane Despret, the piece explores what cannot be resolved, using theatre’s spectral dimension to imagine passage between forms.

In French.

Samar Haddad King’s Shabaab blends dance, theatre and puppetry to trace the intimate bond between two Palestinian friends, Mohamed and Mahmoud. Through movement, dialogue and a haunting puppet by Sipho Ngxola, the piece reconstructs memories, imagined futures and the silences carved by colonial violence. The choreography explores youth, tenderness and forms of resistance, creating a fragile space where friendship becomes a means of survival and poetic witness.

In English and Arabic with French surtitles.