From out of it emerges a muted sense of unease or disquiet. The piece looks at the paradoxical intimacy arising between two strangers, and its parallels with the audience-performer relationship. For more than twenty years now, the Australian company, with Adriano Cortese at the helm, has been producing experimental nature which probes into our everyday rituals and the strange personal details which reveal themselves beneath the veneer of social convention.
How do we experience the worlds that we inhabit? It all starts on a Melbourne street, when one of the members of the company steps out into the night air and strikes up conversations with complete strangers. The conversations that he records go from the deeply trivial to the existential, and together they provide an intricately detailed partition of the false pretences underlying our relations with others. The pared-down staging plays upon the gap that exists between this textual raw material and the moving bodies on the stage, and examines the ambiguity and uncertainty of our everyday exchanges.
In doing so, it reveals the incoherencies which pepper the accounts of ourselves that we give to others and to ourselves. Little by little, social ritual and the habits of language become disentangled, giving rise to a reflection on our condition as a member of the audience and the possibility of intimacy in theatre.
The multi-disciplinary Tunisian festival Dream City is moving to Aubervilliers at the joint invitation of the Festival d'Automne and La Commune, with the shared desire to make this area rustle, resonate and dream through a dozen creations by international performing and visual artists.
Starting with ordinary everyday gestures such as feeding, living together and getting around, Sofiane Ouissi explores our relationship with birds. Passionate about encounters and the journeys they generate, this time he delves into the relationship with another species. The works of Nil Yalter will be on display in the public space of Aubervilliers.
