Nine dancers appear on stage. More soldiers or powerful strategists? Anyway, they’re parading in trunks. With a martial mood and ready to fight, this group loosens up with a momentum that gives way to ecstasy. And that energy is laughing and contagious! The choreography follows the pattern of a game of Go, where, to win the game, you must balance the forces involved and accept the other person. A response through gestures to Donald Trump’s election – or other past or future populist figures – All I Need invokes everything we need: mutual listening and attention.
Tigre ! Tigre !
With an irresistible phlegm reminiscent of Mr. Bean’s or Buster Keaton’s comicality, Pierric bends over backwards to surprise and bewilder you. Locked in an enigmatic room where the furniture and items come to life, the world magic champion has more than one trick up his sleeve. He surpasses himself to break open both the door’s lock and the audience’s looks. Halfway between burlesque theater and One-Man Magic Show, the goings-on of his escape attempts are no longer under control and trigger hilarity. For his return at Escher Theater, it does look like this full artist, revealed at Avignon’s OFF Festival, is… Raring to go!
Forever
Dressed in long white skirts, five proud characters stare at the audience. Are they beings of flesh and blood? Olympian gods? There forever, or mere mortals? Ethereal even when they fall, melodious even when they moan, harmonious even when they pretend to perish, they play and replay their own death all over again. The scenes of agony multiply, with a liberal amount of blood. Based on children’s outlook on death and the after, Swiss artist Tabea Martin invents a cathartic and a tad off-the-wall choreography that questions our representations on the subject, and makes us rather die of laughter than scared to death!
Instantanés #2 & #3 / Ô mon frère !
Ben Aïm brothers are all this at the same time: About twenty creations, twenty years of collaboration, artistic complicities from all backgrounds, and more than 800 performances. The duo presents two female solos and a male trio, brisk and intimate choreographies, sometimes bordering on trance. First round: Léa Lansade dances on fanciful compositions from György Ligeti. Second roud: Alex Blondeau, who performed in Maguy Marin’s and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s plays, deploys his ardor in the night. Third, coarser round: three men fight against an adversity, softened by Léonard Cohen’s music.
After the performance we invite you to a post-show talk with the artists in the theater hall.
Ssst!
Ah, white rabbits! Your just need a hat or a pocket, to see them appear, just by magic. They’re like that, they can’t help it… When you grab one, or rather, when the mischievous animal puts his tender little pawn on us, what should we do? Letting him narrate to us his secret and poetic stories, naturally. With a few handkerchiefs, guitar notes and other knickknacks wielded with a lot of dexterity, duo Florschütz & Döhnert appeals to the imagination of the young and less young audience members. The infinitesimal becomes grandiose, the ordinary becomes unique and the scene becomes a cosmos where everything, absolutely everything, becomes possible.
Floating Flowers
Floating Flowers owes its name to a religious celebration in honor of the deceased in Taiwan. Glowing lanterns, carrying hopes and wishes, are handed over to the lakes’ and rivers’ waters, towards the hereafter. Based on that ritual, choreographer Po-Cheng Tsai invented a ballet that has since been acclaimed at Avignon Festival and internationally. Eight dancers wearing a white underskirt, filled with muslin, seem to be floating on a body of water that’s sometimes tranquil, sometimes turbulent. A mix of cello and electronic tones, the music ends up carrying them away in a whirling pace.
Concerto pour deux clowns
As undeniable as mathematic formula (-)×(-) = (+), two clowns that everything opposes, held by the same desire to play a high-level music score, are going to make the audience shake with laughter. Winners of the audience Prize at Avignon OFF Festival, this athletic man and this virtuoso woman, as expert at violin as at contortion, find some common ground. Without a word said, those two wanderers offer a classical concerto whose immoderation, eccentricity, and comicality are boundless. Already acclaimed at Escher Theater, this show returns with an even more off-the-wall and hilarious version.
Kantus
True to the style that made its success, company Système Castafiore blends tale, video, and imposing techniques from Italian-style theater to make a sumptuous choreography appear. In this prolific parade, the appearance of half-human, half-animal silhouettes almost resembles magic. There, you come across creatures with gigantic claws or with oversized horns and antlers. You also encounter musicians and ancestral priests intoxicated by the chants of an enchanting liturgy. Those beings seem to be participating in a funeral rite of a world on the road to perdition. A world that’s far away, and so close at the same time.
Parent-child theater workshop
Around ZongenZodi, our activity leaders offer you a workshop of games and theatrical improvs.
This workshop is offered as part of “P’tits brunchs du théâtre”: before or after a young-audience show, our team offers you to have a brunch with your kids and take part in activities as a family.
11:00 am or 03:00 pm Show ZongenZodi
12:00 am Brunch (free)
01:00>02:30 pm Parent-child theater workshop (5€)
New Year Eve’s concert
An original hybridization of sacred songs of African origin and Protestant Christian hymns, gospel is an unmissable part of African-American musical art. This new edition of New Year’s concert celebrates this community art and shakes up its conservatism by engaging it, body and soul, into a fusion with Western classical music’s universe. Gathering on that occasion the musicians from Estro Armonico and the London Community Gospel Choir, Gast Waltzing imagines a communicative concert that conveys many positive messages and strong values.