Cultural Kiosk at UN Geneva & CERN

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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It is a broken piece of which only fragments are visible, which the audience reconstructs as best they can. A piece full of holes, like the memory of something that is about to happen. An attempt to assassinate time. A study of rhythm. A declaration of love for the unpredictable, written with the precision of an accident.

To write the unexpected, so that the encounter between the theatre, the artists and the audience alone forms the show, Camille Boitel, Sève Bernard and four performers will arrive at the Comédie de Genève empty-handed. Gathering, salvaging and tinkering with whatever they find on site, they will construct the possibility of the immediate, working to undo the expectations of the performance in order to better open themselves, collectively, to the unknown.

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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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