Échelle Humaine

In partnership with the Festival d’Automne, Lafayette Anticipations is presenting the Paris premiere of La vertigineuse histoire d’Orthosia (2024) by filmmakers and artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. In this performance, the duo leads the viewer into the history of the Nahr al-Bared camp in northern Lebanon, where the remains of a lost Roman city have reappeared, The artists draw us into a palimpsest of cycles of construction and destruction, upheaval and regeneration, revealing a past that is strikingly close to the present.

In their Paris premiere, choreographers and dancers Makisig Akin and Anya Cloud present their piece We Are (nothing) Everything (2023). Based on the question “What can we do together that we cannot do alone?” the duo embodies the many ways in which queer love manifests itself over time. Makisig Akin and Anya Cloud embrace and collide, searching for the conditions in which desire, grief, violence, and tenderness can coexist.

The Complete Works, by visual artist Nina Beier, will be presented on the top floor of the Fondation for the three days of the festival. Created in 2009, the work is based on an invitation to retired dancers to try and remember every choreography they have performed, in chronological order. At Lafayette Anticipations, Nina Beier called on two Étoile dancers of the Paris Opera. Their movements are revived by the search of former gestures—a genuine archaeology of cognitive and muscular memory in which dance teeters on the brink between emergence and escape.

Also making its Paris debut, the performance Federico (2015) by choreographer Alex Baczyński-Jenkins focuses on the emergence  of gestures on the most intimate of scales: that of the hands. Shared between two performers, Federico explores transmission as a means of archiving touch. This furtive and delicate piece will be presented four times during the festival, taking audiences into the communal spaces of the Fondation.

The festival also takes shape through a series of events—discussions, screenings, and workshops—enabling audience members to delve deeper into the gestures and stories explored in the performances. This year’s Échelle Humaine aims to welcome as many personal and collective enquiries as possible, to carefully reconsider that which holds us together.   

Programming: Madeleine Planeix-Crocker

Cover image: La vertigineuse histoire d'Orthosia, J. Hadjithomas & K. Joreige Theater Commons Tokyo'25 ©️ Yutaro Yamaguchi