Échelle Humaine

Their bodies open a path to forgotten or unfinished figures, stories and events. Through dance and performance, the artists bring these latent elements to the surface to nourish collective imaginations, both fleeting and passionate.

Their bodies pave the way to forgotten or unfinished figures, stories and events. Through dance and performance, the artists bring these latent elements to the surface to nourish collective imaginations that are both fleeting and fierce.

In partnership with the Festival d’Automne, Lafayette Anticipations presents This resting, patience (2024) by choreographer Ewa Dziarnowska, for its French premiere. Supported on stage by performer Leah Marojević, Dziarnowska creates a dance in which gestures, like time, stretch out and loop back. New dimensions emerge, fostering connections woven through the tenderness and care shared between the performers and the audience, who become witnesses to a spectral ceremony.

The artist Tai Shani immerses us in a unique listening experience with her new sound piece, M.I.A.S.M.A. The 12 Choruses for Antigone. A choir of twelve female singers performs a text by Shani that reinterprets the myth of Antigone in the light of contemporary human and environmental disasters. The revolutionary figure of Antigone embodies a message of resistance and radical love, to which the artist gives voice, set to a musical composition by Aga Ujma.

Also on the first floor of the Fondation, dancer and choreographer Catol Teixeira presents their new solo piece ODE (2025), which revisits the traces of dances that have been abandoned over time. The solo is thus composed of fragments, protocols and choreographic experiments that had been left in limbo, to which the artist breathes new life.

Le Ciel (3rd floor) hosts the ‘fictional session’ activated during Figuring Age, conceived by the artist duo Boglárka Börcsök and Andreas Bolm. On this occasion, the artists revive a little-known chapter of history: that of modern dance in Hungary in the 1930s. Meeting three of the last remaining dancers from that era, now aged between 90 and 101, the artists gather their memories, which become the material for a subtle and poignant performance of embodiment, led by Börcsök.

 These imaginative worlds are also brought to life during events open to the public.

A screening and discussion with the artist and director Laura Huertas Millán offers an opportunity to look back on the ten-year journey of her film Black Sun (2016). Centred on the protagonist, Antonia, an opera singer in rehabilitation following a suicide attempt, the film blends fiction, auto-ethnography and music to sketch the portrait of an artist returning to the living.

The practical workshop led by dancer, sound documentary maker and author Myriam Rabah-Konaté offers an opportunity to discover her artistic approach, situated at the crossroads of improvised dance, sensory mapping and sound creation – ways of bringing to life that which is fading away. 

Curator: Madeleine Planeix-Crocker
In partnership with Libération.

Cover image: Ewa Dziarnowska, This resting, patience (2024) © Spyros Rennt