A community of seven performers puts its unity and its bonds to the test. Trapped within a narration that keeps looping back to the beginning, they topple the balance of every situation, keeping in mind that the central concept of repetition forbids neither movement nor transformation. On the stage, they draw cards: the Oblique Strategies created by musician-producer Brian Eno and painter Peter Schmidt, which give them rules to follow, to break, to stack one on top of the other. Their accumulation creates the fertile ground on which the group play and stumble, eager to experiment with states, emotions, intentions. Mischievous and sometimes wicked children, romantic characters that fall prey to melancholy… Everything is created in front of us, between extreme precision and fragility, carried by pre-recorded sonic loops which are then reinvented by the dancers. In this invariably circular process begin to appear breaches, like pockets of freedom that each and every one can enter to escape destiny. For through this attempt to break free within repetition itself, what we’re talking about here is artistic creation. Much like Timbuktu, a name everyone is familiar with but which is forever fantasised, interpreted, sublimated.

— Renan Benyamina for the Festival d’Avignon

Photos©Laurent Philippe