Traces of Gounouj

Toi, moi, Tituba… is based on French philosopher Elsa Dorlin’s essay on Maryse Condé’s heroine Tituba. As a Black woman and so-called witch, Tituba gives a voice to those who are silenced by force. Inspired by this story, Dorothée Munyaneza uses her own body as an archive, and with composer Khyam Allami, presents a multiplicity of silenced voices and perspectives to revive memories and celebrate them through dance and music.

Camille Henrot brings her interdisciplinary practice to the stage for the first time, incorporating the stock characters and comic ploys of the Italian Renaissance theatrical tradition within a modern-day New York City apartment building. The delivery of a package triggers a cascade of uncanny events among tenants, as the tragi-comedic play attempts to make sense out of the senseless, ultimately collapsing into it.

Returning to Crossing The Line after Αγρίμι / Fauve in 2024, choreographer Lenio Kaklea continues her exploration of ecology through dance. In The Birds, she takes inspiration from the ways in which birds structure their behavior through dance and song, from mating rituals to hunting patterns. Bright colors, acrobatics and energetic movements contrast with the eerie sense of being watched, as Kaklea questions the precarious equilibrium between freedom and subjugation.

Part ritual, part concert, part theatrical assembly, Nexus de l’adoration gathers song, speech, choreography, and devotion into a vivid ceremony for a fractured contemporary world. Paying homage to our world’s fascinating and expansive diversity, nine officiants sing, dance and speak in a hybrid liturgy for our time.

Visionary playwright and director Tiago Rodrigues returns to Crossing The Line for the third year in a row with an urgent, unforgettable new work exploring separation, communication, and the consequences of our decisions. As humanity struggles to survive on Earth in 2077, a daughter chooses life in exile on Mars, leaving her father behind to grapple with love, loss, and the challenge of maintaining connections across unnavigable distances.

A Latin expression, literally meaning “in accordance with one’s wishes or until satiety,” Ad Libitum is a piece about the desire to create, to step outside oneself, to expand. Dancer Simon Le Borgne and musician Ulysse Zangs explore the idea of molting, of emptying yourself through dance and live music. Driven by a musical score of drums, electric guitar and synths, the performance expresses the need to change skin and shed all substance, as well as the need to embody yourself, to fill your own container.

Returning after the sold-out US Premiere of LACRIMA during last year’s Crossing The Line, Caroline Guiela Nguyen conjures up a vision of France as it exists beyond the limits it has been given, beyond its own borders. Set between 1990s France and 1950s Vietnam, Saigon unfolds in a vibrant restaurant where people gather to rebuild fragments of their lives across generations and continents.

Making its English-language premiere, this one-woman piece is a collaboration between renowned French playwright Pascal Rambert and actress Pauline Chalamet. The play follows a young woman with a Master’s degree, who is—temporarily—a window cleaner, as she expresses her anger at social stratification and grapples with loneliness.

Dancer and choreographer Liz Santoro recounts her life onstage. Some memories are real, others are generated by artificial intelligence; some movements originate from her body, others are fabricated by an algorithm trained on her dancing. This Is Unreal constructs a hybrid world which asks: Where does the body end and the machine begin?

In adaku, part 2, sweat variant, the collaborative practice of Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, continues a speculative trilogy exploring one family’s entanglement with the transatlantic slave trade, set in a near-future United States. At the crossroads of dance, theater, and visual arts, this piece invites audiences into cycles of ritual and repair.

Choreographer François Chaignaud and beatboxer Aymeric Hainaux engage in a percussive duel. Through their voices, feet, arms, props and costumes, the artists create a duet that is as uncategorizable as the word mirliton (which ranges in definition from a kid’s flute to a style of military hat).

A narrator begins reading Claude Ponti’s Mille secrets de poussins, but things don’t go as planned… Full of mischief, the poussins (chicks) have hidden themselves in the library and start popping out of the books to play tricks on him. Accompanied by animated videos and multimedia effects, the performer leads the audience into a playful world.