Cultural Kiosk at UN Geneva & CERN

What are our emotions made of?
How do they work within us?
What are they made up of?
Should we always put them at a distance?
Where should we move them?
How do we observe them?

With Honda Romance, Vimala Pons, circus artist, actress, performer and director, creates a sensitive translation at real speed of the unstoppable, non-hierarchical flow of thought. Song and music (composed by Tsirihaka Harrivel and Rebeka Warrior), dance, walking and working with gravity combine to give form to the inner movement of emotions, to imbalances and to the perpetual adjustment that makes up our existence.

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Following the itinerary of a dress commissioned by an English princess for her wedding, LACRIMA weaves its tale of the world among the small hands and big names involved in making it.
From the offices of a major Parisian fashion house to the embroidery workshops in Mumbai, via Alençon where lace-makers pass on an ancestral skill that is on the brink of extinction, LACRIMA reveals beneath the media prestige and princely glory the sensitive weave of individuals prepared to risk their lives to achieve excellence.

On stage, Caroline Guiela Nguyen mixes languages (Tamil, French, English, French sign language), video and bodies, professional and non-professional performers, fiction and reality, intimacy and collective trajectories to create a poignant fresco on the global division of labour, the transmission of know-how and dedication to art.

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During a safari he undertakes to discover and consume all that Africa has to offer, Faust is gradually transformed into the archetypal Western colonist, sinking ever deeper into greed.
In this adaptation of Goethe’s play, William Kentridge plunges Faust into the imaginary world of colonial imagery, its clichés, its excesses and its violence.
Faustus in Africa! is a landmark play that introduced the work of South African artist William Kentridge to European audiences in 1995 at the Festival d’Avignon and was originally created in Cape Town four years after the end of apartheid in South Africa. Using all the means of theatre and the arts, it sets out to tell the story of the exploitation and domination of the African continent by the West.

Conceived with the Handspring Puppet Company, the show intimately blends the art of puppetry with animated film, the visual arts and literature, creating a sensitive and critical journey to the heart of the shared history of Africa and Europe.

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After the death of his journalist father, Tiago Rodrigues opens the notebook in which he had been working non-stop on a final article, but instead of text he discovers only fragments, lines, dots and abstract, meaningless drawings.
Tapping into the gaps and frustration created by this discovery, Tiago Rodrigues creates a labyrinthine play about mourning, memory, ghosts and the power of storytelling.

The sixth instalment in the Histoire(s) du théâtre series initiated at NTGent by Milo Rau in 2018 (and to which Angélica Liddell and Miet Warlop have contributed), No Yogurt for the Dead multiplies registers, aesthetics and genres, exploring all the means of the stage, from realism to dream, from narrative to musical comedy, to reveal the capacity of theatre to listen to the dead – and to make them speak with the living.

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Vudú is a play that tells the story of a pact with the devil.
Asteroid 3318 Blixen was discovered on 23 April 1985 at the Brorfelde observatory in Denmark. It was named after Baroness Karen Blixen, better known by her pen name Isak Dinesen. Karen Blixen promised her soul to the devil, and in return the devil promised that everything she lived and experienced from then on would become a story.

In this creation, the first part of a Funeral Trilogy, artist, performer, actress and author Angélica Liddell explores the power of revenge and ritual. In a performance that combines a retrospective look at her past work with a questioning of what motivates her creative gesture, she traces a fatal route to her own funeral.

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After Absalon, Absalon! Séverine Chavrier turns her attention to the intimate and to female desire in OCCUPATIONS.

Drawing on a vast body of work – from Marguerite Duras to Annie Ernaux, Elfriede Jelinek and Constance Debré – the director continues her exploration of the tensions between the visible and the hidden, through a set-up that questions the relationship between the ancient and the contemporary, the digital and the bookish, the museified and the ordinary everyday. She draws a singular cartography, where feminist resistance does not always take the form of productive autonomy, but sometimes of dangerous abandonment, of temporary anomie.

Who today can give in to passion to the point of becoming its morbid plaything? At what cost in terms of danger and underlying activism?
Séverine Chavrier sees writing and theatre as a performative act of bodily reappropriation, capable of reconfiguring contemporary modes of love and desire, outside Western normative frameworks.

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What is adolescence? The age of possibilities? The age of boredom? The age of rare lucidity? An impetus or a retreat?

Four aspiring musicians, most of them hoping to make a career out of music, as they emerge from adolescence. Three young men, one young woman, in the age of possibilities as much as anxieties. They play the bassoon, the piano and the violin; she sings. In the intimacy of their bedrooms, they indiscriminately share their musical obsessions, and the trivial, sometimes brutal words attached to the discovery of their desire. Learning about desire and learning about music together make up a paradoxical story of training, on the edge between the prosaic and the lyrical.

Created in 2020 with four students from the Orléans Conservatoire aged between 14 and 17, Aria da Capo deploys the language of adolescence in a show conceived as a variation on persistent motifs: the discipline imposed by learning an instrument, fraternity, admiration, fear of failure, confrontation with peers and old masters. Adolescence is both openness and isolation, solitude and fraternity – raw and sublime.

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Alan Turing—a brilliant (bio)mathematician, computer scientist, and cryptographer—played a key role in the Allies’ cracking of the famous Enigma cipher machine during World War II, contributing to their victory but also shortening the war by nearly two years. When it was revealed in the 1950s that he was homosexual, the same British government that profited enormously from his work sentenced him to chemical castration.

With Oracle, Łukasz Twarkowski and author Anka Herbut craft a complex narrative that blends Alan Turing’s biography and the historical context of the post-World War II era with a futuristic, timeless digital world. A Polish director as virtuoso in his narrative and dramaturgical constructions as in his spectacular mastery of multimedia tools on stage (particularly video), Łukasz Twarkowski continues his reflection on the place of science and technology in our societies here—initiated in particular by his previous production, Quanta, premiered in Vilnius in the fall of 2024.

The exploration of Alan Turing’s tragic biography and his legacy is here the starting point for a reflection on the politicization of science and technological advances, their entanglement with geopolitical conflicts, but also the metaphysical upheavals of a future in which AI would take a constitutive place—a future that Alan Turing’s visionary genius helped to create.

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A rainy evening in 1987 in Paris. The great actress Jacqueline Maillan decides to kill herself.

Unable to come to terms with the inexorable decline of her career, this queen of the boulevard invites us to her farewell as a last performance of herself.
However, a twist of fate throws a spanner in the works: she is offered a major role. But it’s too late; a cocktail of barbiturates is already coursing through her veins.

Like a headless chicken, she fights against fate to realise the dream she thought had been buried: to return to the stage.
Following on from La Côte d’Azur and Le Père Noël est une benne à ordures, both premiered at POCHE/GVE, the trio of actress Rébecca Balestra, director Manon Krüttli and playwright Guillaume Poix have created a tribute to boulevard theatre icon Jacqueline Maillan in the form of a hallucinatory reverie about refusing death, loneliness and the desire for glory.

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A Black woman travels the world’s museums at night, dreaming, in search of the fragmented bodies of all those Black women who have populated the margins of paintings since the Renaissance. She invites them to join her on a voyage through time, on a ship captained by the Black Venus.

This short prose text by American poet Robin Coste Lewis offers a radical and delightful rereading of art history.

On discovering this text during an artistic residency in New York, filmmaker Alice Diop recognised her own questions in it, transfigured in this vast poetic epic. After her first reading in 2023, as part of a carte blanche offered by the Festival d’Automne, she took to the stage for the first time, entrusting Robin Coste Lewis’s words to Geneva artist, performer and actress Kayije Kagame.

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They wanted to talk about the collapse, but what had collapsed in their lives was love.

Whether they were wondering about the climate or the permafrost, the only thing they were trying to resolve was whether they were going to be able to get through it in love. What if the collapse of the world had to do with the collapse of love? Could the rationalisation of love relationships be a consequence of the depletion of resources?

Between Greece and Mexico, on the vertical face of a cliff, climbers re-enact the choreography of love: clinging, climbing, flying, falling, helping each other, falling…

Neró – Italian for “black”, but also Greek for “water” – is a play in several tableaux, seeking a way to put love back at the centre of our concerns.

For this new production at La Comédie, part of a series of shows based around colours, Geneva-based Greek director Anna Lemonaki has invited scriptwriter and author Julie Gilbert, co-director of the Théâtre du Loup, to collaborate with her.

Together, they combine the collapse of the planet with intimate collapses, combining the collective and the individual, and tuning in to our contemporary frailties.

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After an absence of almost a century, wolves have reestablished themselves in the Vaud Jura, near Gimel, the village where Judith Zagury lives and works with ShanjuLab – a theatrical research laboratory on the presence of animals.

Observing the way in which this return blurs the established boundaries between humans and animals, between the wild and the farmed, she has created a hybrid form on the theatre stage, a video installation featuring video artist and journalist Séverine Chave, transdisciplinary mediator Dariouch Ghavami and the dogs Azad, Lupo and Yova, all members of ShanjuLab.

In bocca al lupo is the fruit of fieldwork, meetings with people affected by the return of the wolf – farmers, shepherds, scientists, political authorities, wildlife wardens, associations, journalists – and nightly watches of herds of cows and sheep. On the theatre stage, it reveals the sensitive and invisible mapping of overlapping territories, those of humans, animals and customs.

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A young widow and debt-ridden heiress, Anna organises a party on her vast estate, as she does every year, to relieve boredom as much as to celebrate the end of an interminable winter.

Exacerbated by alcohol and the heat of summer, frustrations, desires and hopes come together and unravel. Around the figure of Micha, a melancholy and solitary misanthrope, the tensions between individuals whose relationships are poisoned by money, regret and misunderstanding are revived and revealed.
Following on from his production of The Seagull, Cyril Teste freely adapts Platonov, Chekhov’s over-the-top early play which, in terms of its themes and depth, foreshadows the whole of his future work.

Concentrating the action over the course of one night, from the reunion of the different characters until the early hours of the morning, Cyril Teste continues his work of hybridisation between cinema and theatre, plunging the audience into the heart of the party, tracing through the camera, in the labyrinth of bodies and faces, bursts of conversation and music, the paths of desire and solitude.

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You wake up in an airport.
You don’t know who you are or where you’re
going. You have two passports and a fingertip wipe in your bag.
You’re wearing a glittering tiara and your
makeup is like a stolen car.
You know every Enrico Macias song by heart.
You’re a rational girl. What do you do?

Double Nationality is a choral performance whose plot takes place inside a brain. That of a young woman, Rkvaa, a dual national in a crisis of identity indeterminacy, living alone with a potted basilisk, a stuffed mole, and uninterrupted thoughts that speak to her in the second person plural. Perfectly bilingual and a translator-interpreter, she sometimes works for the French police on drug trafficking and pimping cases. Furthermore, she’s vegan, a bit of an alcoholic, socially awkward, and sometimes imagines herself to be something she’s not, such as a princess or Salman Rushdie’s daughter.

After directing his own texts, writing for other artists, and even inventing his own (almost) stand-up routine, French-speaking director, actor, and author Joël Maillard is tackling a novel for the stage for the first time. To adapt this text by Nina Yargekov, which places the reader in the uncomfortable and troubling position of its main character, four actresses take to the stage, embodying the novel’s protagonist but also the chorus of contradictory thoughts that haunt her, along a journey shaped like an enigma, an investigation into identity and against identity, in all its form.

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Three pieces about desire, three ways of writing the coming together and going apart of bodies.

Boris Charmatz joins Pina Bausch’s iconic Café Müller (1978) with two pieces from his own repertoire. The bodies that relentlessly embrace and repel each other in Pina Bausch’s piece are matched by those separated in Aatt enen tionon (1996) and the intertwined duet from herses (une lente introduction) (1997).

With this triple programme, Tanztheater Wuppertal and Boris Charmatz offer a turbulent evening of colliding aesthetics, music by PJ Harvey and Purcell, bodies and ways of looking at dance.

Club Amour, instructions for use.

The Club Amour audience sees all three pieces. There are two times each evening.

Audiences at the first performance will first see Aatt enen tionon et herses, duo, followed by Café Müller.

Audiences at the second performance will see Café Müller first, followed by Aatt enen tionon et herses, duo.

For Aatt enen tionon et herses, duo, the audience is seated on the stage, standing or sitting on the floor. These 2 pieces contain complete nudity.

For Café Müller, the entire audience is seated in the auditorium.

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Forgotten, erased from the narratives of Russian memory, women nonetheless actively took part in the fighting of the Second World War – the Great Patriotic War, as it is known in Russia.

It is their voices, collected and woven together into a complex choral narrative by writer Svetlana Alexievitch (winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015), their stories and their memories that Julie Deliquet brings to the stage.

In a space that shows the multiplicity of temporalities, from the war to the present day via Soviet communal flats, the director brings together an all-female cast that brings together all generations, to make these stories heard and the way they resonate with the contemporary world, haunted by the return of war to Europe and the threat of Russian imperialism.

“I write not the history of war or of the State, but the history of men and women, thrown by their times into the epic depths of a colossal event.” – Svetlana Alexievitch

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A neon restaurant sign on the outskirts of Tirana sheds light on the story of one family.

An unexpected incident that occurs under the light of this sign has a crucial effect on Mario’s life. Years later, as an adult, director Mario Banushi, who has travelled from Greece to Albania for years to meet his family and return to the family tavern, now transports that same sign from Tirana to Athens, placing it at the centre of the world he creates on stage.

In this creation, a cross between musical theatre and performance, the young artist Mario Banushi embraces his memories and nostalgia in order to cope with the absence of his recently deceased father, the cook and owner of the tavern who welcomed customers every evening. The paintings he creates, in an aesthetic that combines hallucination with the representation of everyday life, draw in the silence, the unspoken, the heart-rending contours of an absence and the silhouette of mourning.

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Qui a tué mon père is not a question, but an indignant statement.
In this short, implacable text, Édouard Louis observes the premature exhaustion that marked his father’s body. Through a series of fragments and observations on his father’s life, he points to the collective and social responsibilities that have left their mark on his father’s body.

After adapting Histoire de la violence, Thomas Ostermeier has invited Édouard Louis to bring his text of anger, vengeance and infinite tenderness to the stage. The author’s presence on the stage brings his autobiographical and critical approach to the head, revealing the anger, the paradoxical tenderness and the need for him to speak out.

“You can no longer drive without endangering yourself, you can no longer drink alcohol, you can no longer shower or go to work without taking immense risks. You’re barely over fifty. You belong to that category of human beings to whom politics reserves an early death”. – Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père, Seuil, 2018

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Pour un temps sois peu is a trans woman’s story told in detail, the dangerous details, the cruel details, but the real details told by someone who lived it, really lived it.

In her flesh and in her friendship. And not just another fantasised story written or performed by a cisgender person. Pour un temps sois peu is a manifesto, a reassertion of the intimate voice of trans people. An attempt to create more culture. More culture, not more fantasy.

In Pour un temps sois peu, a hard-hitting stand-up comedy, Laurène Marx tells the story of a trans woman’s journey and the violence that goes with it: the violence of all kinds of assignments and injunctions, of medical procedures, of constant aggression, of the processes of invisibilisation at work, of the discourses and rules of a profoundly heteronormative society. In a language born of rage and the urgent need to reclaim reality, Laurène Marx exposes her experiences, her intimacy and her history with force, laughter and anger.

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In La Mariée and Bonne nuit Cendrillon, the first chapter of the Cadela Força Trilogy, Carolina Bianchi and the Cara de Cavalo collective brought to the stage reflections on the history of performance and theatricality alongside brutal stories of rape and feminicide.
Sexual trauma, the resurrection of past performances and the impact of a dose of GHB substitute – known as the rapist’s drug – administered by Carolina Bianchi on stage formed the tragic and radical itinerary of this first chapter in the form of a “Dantesque” journey.

In Brotherhood, the second chapter of the trilogy, artist and performer Carolina Bianchi examines the complexity of certain pacts of masculinity, the origins of brotherhood between men and the violent mutual codes that perpetuate rape and sexual violence as an integral part of their vocabulary.

Artist and performer Carolina Bianchi uses the principles of theatre to articulate possible avenues for this discussion, creating strong links between representation and real trauma, power structures in art and radical poetry, the origins of misogyny and sexuality in crisis. The structure of the show proves to be a trap, weakening Carolina Bianchi’s place as an author and transforming her into a character who suffers the consequences of having scrutinised the Brotherhood so closely.

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It’s a crazy race to nowhere!

Julian Vogel, on his bike or roller skates, turns relentlessly around a circular track, chasing as much as he flees from a ceramic sphere that swings like a pendulum around the stage. On this circular stage, Julian Vogel puts on a circus of all kinds, performing the entire show on his own, constantly shifting between the music and the apparatus, the plates balancing and the ones breaking on the floor.

Maintaining constant suspense with simple elements straight out of the collective imagination of the classical circus, Julian Vogel writes CERAMIC CIRCUS like composing music, using loops, rhythm and counterpoint. The clatter of plates, the roll of drums and the feats become the elements of a virtuoso composition that traces its way along a ridge between feat and fragility, balance and clumsiness, calm and suspense.

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It’s a uniformly grey world, governed by rules as precise as they are implacable, a competition without mercy. Two champions face each other, on either side of a ring in which avatars, humanoids with mechanical gestures executed on command, compete on their behalf in fiercely competitive events that are nonetheless strangely adapted from everyday life.

Somewhere between video games, visual arts, circus arts and puppetry, Alice Laloy creates a total, dystopian world. Virtuoso to the point of disturbance, the performers – acrobats, singers, contortionists, dancers – fascinate and worry at the same time, creating a space of confusion that questions the relationships of domination at work in our contemporary world, but also our capacity for revolt and change.

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Just when you thought she’d been swallowed up by life, failures and complications, Marion Duval returns, ahead of schedule, better prepared to face her worst enemies and all the villains in the world, whom she can see through her invisible glasses.

Borrowing some of the major arguments put forward by Donna Haraway, Vinciane Despret and Baptiste Morizot, notably about cohabitation with other living beings and terror in the face of the end of the capitalist world, Marion Duval reinvents herself before your very eyes. But she never stops cutting the branch that supports her, or as a theatre critic would say, biting the hand that feeds her.

However, the artist rises above the traps set by her reading of things, runs the risk of becoming as hard as a rock, jumps into bottomless holes, unleashes the power of her sacred feminine in her fall, and finally envelops the audience in a new kind of free hug.

And then the magic happens: all you have to do is blink, and the stage is populated. Marion is no longer alone. A horde of extras has invaded the space and seems ready to turn heaven and earth upside down.

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