Thomas Quillardet

Alone onstage, Thomas Quillardet unravels the stories of patients he encountered during an artistic residency in a hospital. He assembles a polyphony of voices in order to share in his empathy and create a radiography of what links us together.

In what ways does the unstoppable development of artificial intelligence (AI) permeate our lives and behaviour? Kurō Tanino, playwright of the poetry of our everyday lives and the imperceptible movements of the psyche, brings to the stage a world in which technology reveals the depths of our unconscious.

Sorour Darabi, the Iranian choreographer, who has been living in France since 2013, unveils his first opera, an ambulatory performance which enables voices marginalized by ancient myths to be heard. It is a piece devised by and for committed bodies.

The choreographer Katerina Andreou draws upon the constant confusion and noise of the world as the driving force in this her first group piece. Playfulness, absurdity, fiction and poetry arise from within this mental and emotional state. 

Like descending into the darkest depths of hell, Carolina Bianchi exposes the unspeakable horror of sexist violence, plunging us into a median space in which all memory becomes blurred. Following in the footsteps of the artist Pippa Bacca, she uses her own body for the purposes of the piece, thereby anchoring herself in the history of feminist performance, and casting a critical gaze upon it at the same time.

Taking his inspiration from traditional Japanese forms, playwright and director Satoko Ichihara brings us a puppet theatre for today's world. It is a troubled one, in which the story revolves around the ambiguous nature of the dolls. In this modern tale, loneliness, suffering and sexuality are the driving forces behind these puppets the various weaknesses of which makes them ever more human.

By reconstituting four perfectly extraordinary, but very real, stories Marcus Lindeen and Marianne Ségol raise questions about the notion of memory. Their unique form of theatre, in which spoken words of a personal nature are exchanged and feed off each other, is scrupulously crafted and philosophical in equal measure. 

Brought to the stage by visual artist Théo Mercier, Skinless is a disenchanted Eden built on a landscape of rubbish. Amidst this XXL end-of-the-world panorama, an out of the ordinary couple loves and tears each other apart under the watchful eye of a tragic observer.

Directed by Romeo Castellucci, Gustav Mahler's Resurrection symphony seems to take on all its tragic grandeur. Masterfully conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Italian director magnifies this monumental work in order bring us a funereal “song of the earth” from which nobody emerges unscathed.

There are no puppets in this large-scale new work by puppeteer Alice Laloy. Instead, we encounter humans which have been transformed into avatars and then thrown into a ring In order to compete in increasingly violent matches. This mise en abyme, at the frontier between wrestling-inspired ritual and video game scenario, invites us to question the limits of a society which simply follows orders.

Following on from the Portrait dedicated to her by the Autumn Festival two years ago, Marlene Monteiro Freitas hijacks the match: twenty-five virtuoso performers, each wearing the same number 3 vests, throw the score into disarray, measure themselves against the grotesque and warp the game. This show sees the eccentric choreographer passing on to the Lyon Opera Ballet a jousting match of hybrid times, a carnivalesque fresco in which the human, animal and machine have a tendency to merge.