Presentation

Solid footsteps striking the ground with elegance, chins up and colorful clothes, carefully put together…
An immersive setting questions the standards, the stage itself and the audience.
The impulse of the traditional dances, in its concentric shape, embodies the scenography. The dancers energy circulates between the fringes and the centre of the stage. 
Inhabited by this collective force, theirs voices and movements become a projectile to expose torture and injustice.
A hanging image inspired by a so violent desire that exceeds reality… A Mirage.

ARTIST’S NOTE

2015 was a turning point in our journey.
We started to use the public space which seemed an ideal playground to feed our artistic approach. Performing out on the streets allowed us to meet new audiences, new places and new territories. We had a lot to share with the people we met; their stories, their doubts, their fears and their hopes. On our journeys we found a creativity which draws its strength from the toughest source, but also the purest.
This was particularly significant in the Ballata refugee camp in Napelouse, West Bank, where children have offered us their dance. The Dabkeh, an energetic, rhythmic, visceral traditional dance, an eruption of euphoria, resilience and resistance.

Enriched by these experiences, we wanted to question the limits of a crisis situation, the breaking point that opens the field to this powerful and offbeat creative impulse.
With Mirage, we want to create bridges and tunnels, link colors, songs, rhythms, and emotions which emit from popular traditional, oral, and contemporary musical cultures encountered around the world.
It reveals the contradictions within the same piece of music or with the choreography, and provokes contrasting feelings in the audience.
We want to hustle up the usual codes of intimate and those of live performances.

The audience becomes an actor; the music, the voices, the bodies come from all sides because the whole setting is designed with this perspective of total immersion.
The spectators share the space with the performers. They are free to move around and follow whatever they feel attracted to, and they also have to accept that they will be experiencing their own segment of the piece, a partial and singular one.
There is no longer a stage per se, but several stages as if each one, in its individuality, was part of a whole: here an enraged solo performed with breathtaking energy, there a duo of feet hitting the ground to resist, or a group dance in a unifying line, a Dabkeh dance, a hip-hop performance…
The funnel closes in this universal expression: dance.

The musical soundtrack develops at the same speed as the choreographic research.
Sound scenography is in symbiosis with the circle, it immerses the public in a 360° broadcast which brings the show to life in a very organic way.
The use of the spaces creates for the audience multiple, diverse, and sometimes opposite perceptions.
This Mirage is also meant to be musical, and to highlight the moment when a lullaby becomes a revolution, when a funeral song becomes a party, a call to union and love, or an absurd war…