Cultural Kiosk at UN Geneva & CERN

Hêtre pourpre is a bold, inventive and sensitive book that has radically renewed the genre of autofiction. Read and meet Kim de l’Horizon, the Swiss-German author who explores the fluid intricacies of queer identity with poetry and fervor.

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Christophe Honoré’s new play tells the story of Emma Bovary and her fervent quest for freedom. In spite of her joyless marriage in a small provincial town, she relentlessly follows her romantic aspirations, and has sometimes been portrayed as irresponsible or inconsistent. But is she really? Hemmed in by literary analyses and adaptations, do we still know how to listen to her? What does our interpretation of this woman’s story say about us? Christophe Honoré brings circus and cinema to the stage to give voice to the “provincial mores” described by Flaubert. By recreating them in the style of a pantomime, the men around Emma re-enact the most illustrious episodes of her life. Then, as the play progresses, Emma reclaims her voice, asserting her subjectivity, sensuality and freedom. Ludivine Sagnier stars as this renowned and mysterious woman whose aspiration to forge her own destiny remains a poignant scandal.

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Choreographer Faustin Linyekula and musician and director Franck Moka, both from Kisangani in the Congo, present an electric concert that feels like a frenzied party designed to forget, or rather, to stay alive: revolving around a dancing woman, music and film embark on a quest to reinvent the self in the face of social, political and historical violence in the Congo. “Because tomorrow we don’t know.”

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Biologist Amaranta Fontcuberta conducted an investigation into the coexistence of two forms of social organisation within a species of ant. Set between the Derborence valley and a genetics laboratory in Lausanne, her experiment is steeped in the human and non-human issues of the territory, questioning the place of scientists in this delicate balance. In collaboration with artist Simon Senn, she brings to the stage a spirited and compassionate search, as technical as it is intimate, for the coexistence of science, the living world, the past, and the here and now.

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Filles explores three generations of women: teenage girls, four actresses in their thirties, and their grandmothers. They talk about their coming of age, their sexuality, their first experiences and their upbringing, set against the backdrop of Croatian and Yugoslav history. A surprising and politically engaged piece of documentary theatre by a women’s theatre collective about pleasure, silence and shame in the face of resurgent patriarchal morality.

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Spolna vzgoja II : Borba retraces the struggle for women’s rights in Yugoslavia. Drawing on documents and biographies and set in a promenade-like scenography, this play directed by Tjaša Črnigoj and featuring two actresses from the Igralke collective, sheds light on the biographies of Vida Tomšič, a politician, and Franc Novak, a gynaecologist. They were married and, each in their own field, defended access to family planning and a progressive approach to sex education. In our current climate, as reproductive rights are being called into question, La Lutte reminds us of the legacy of the struggle for women’s autonomy over their bodies.

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Choreographer Radouan Mriziga dances across the Arabic and European traditions. Magec explores the wisdom of the desert and its relationship to time, light and movement. Carried by a polyphony of texts, sounds and gestures, the show is inspired by the myths, rhythms, crafts and embodied practices of the desert peoples. The multiple logics of the living world are revealed, and a time conducive to meditation, opens up, inviting in the extraordinary intelligences of the natural worlds.

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The dancers welcome you, encircle you and envelop you in a dance that keeps moving and changing. Sometimes belonging to a group is reassuring and nurturing, providing a place for everyone — sometimes it is constraining, manipulative and annihilates emotions and intuitions; the same goes for a pulse or a rhythm. Like Jonah in the myth, La Tendresse du ventre de la baleine is the sensory and danced experience of a voyage across the tightrope between our desire to be authentic while belonging to a group.

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A monumental piece at the very limits of theatre, Vudú is a searing concentration of the tragic, carnal, literary and poetic sensibilities of the Madrilenian playwright, thaumaturge and actress Angélica Liddell. With her words, images and extraordinary performative acts, she speaks of a passion for love that is both absolute and betrayed, a pact concluded with the devil for the sake of revenge and writing, love as an animal act in which one eats the other, childhood and sacrifice, old age and even the organisation of her own funeral. Vudú is a sweeping performance in five parts, an incandescent poem to that which transcends the human and gives birth to humanity, tragedy, senselessness and self-sacrifice.

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As the circus acrobat Julian Vogel spins plates and defies a disjointed bicycle, breakage does occur, but that which is most fragile resists. A drum roll vibrates, a ceramic ball twirls, the acrobat glides on his rollerblades in a sort of frantic race against time, while ceramics break and shatter… With its appetite for risk and joyful stress, Ceramic Circus showcases the contrasts and fragile balances that shape our lives.

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In the year 2077, one part of the human race lives on Mars, while the other continues to live on planet Earth in increasingly precarious conditions. A father (Adama Diop) and his daughter (Alison Dechamps), separated by more than 225 million kilometres, attempt to maintain a relationship over a very, very long distance. In this new play by Tiago Rodrigues, a father-daughter relationship becomes a metaphor for a generational conflict which, in the face of the climate crisis, might well become an existential one. 

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A dance that expresses a return to one’s native village. Ivorian choreographer Nadia Beugré takes to the stage with two singers-griots-musicians in search of a secret, fantastic village: the village of her foremothers on the Ivory Coast, where she grew up. It no longer exists, it has disappeared. And so her steps lead her to a grandmother, a buffalo woman and other powerful women who, in the shadows of memory, made and unmade empires and lineages. This haunted dance is both her search for her self and an expression of a power that is intimate and historical, circulatory and boiling, like the blood in her veins.

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What kind of strange creature is this? Her entire body is going through a slow-motion whirlwind of intense emotions. Is she afraid? Is she angry? Is she remembering painful experiences? The pianist accompanying her is asking himself the same questions. Claire Dessimoz has created a duet aimed at young and older alike, performed by Anne Delahaye and Louis Bonard. First there is contemplation and introspection, then confessions… They recall the superlatives of childhood: their biggest shames, their biggest fears, their biggest blunders, the things that seemed serious to them back then.

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Emotions, laughter, yawning: certain movements have a contagious effect. In neuroscience, it is thought that certain processes in the brain produce mirror effects that could be a key to explaining empathy and mutual understanding. Stefan Kaegi installs a giant mirror on stage, in which you see yourself and the whole audience, like in a giant selfie. Gradually, you start to move, and the moving image becomes collective — a metaphor for the human brain and the relationship between the individual and the community, commented on by the voices of female researchers in neuroscience. An immersive piece of documentary theatre, starring dancers from the company of German choreographer Sasha Waltz.

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The story could be that of a loved one or a stranger: a life turned upside down by a fatal medical diagnosis. It chronicles the body’s betrayal, biomedical objectification and the struggle between living and letting go. In parallel, a once-banned substance resurfaces: LSD, which seems to ease the fear of dying. Mitosis, a voluptuous contemporary musical devised by the American and Zurich-based singer and performer Brandy Butler, blends music, science and introspection to rethink our approach to death.

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Fampitaha, fampita, fampitàna – these three Malagasy words that sound so similar signify comparison, transmission and rivalry. Soa Ratsifandrihana has composed a joyous and dazzling choreographic quartet intertwining dance, music and stories that convey the memory of colonised territories and diaspora, including that of the four performers. Bolstered by formidable virtuosity and contagious energy, foreign traditions and ancestral gestures meet, dialogue and build upon each other as they wander and explore an unprecedented, generous and luminous interplay of cultures.

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Where do we start rethinking our world in order to transform it? Philippe Descola has devoted his life as an anthropologist to studying how humans compose their worlds. The film takes him to embody his ideas, in dialogue with the non-humans all around us. Director Eliza Levy creates an invigorating and stimulating portrait of one of the great thinkers on the infinite relationship between nature and culture.

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Soa Ratsifandrihana remembers her early youth, when her family members would all try to find the right sequence for the right music. Everyone wanted to groove. With a title that evokes the groove of a record, a familiar rhythm, this solo spreads the simple and immediate pleasure of dancing. Borrowing from the grooves of her childhood, she advances, close by, in the shadows, switching from one rhythm to another, in a perpetual reinvention of dance, of the self, and of the intensity of the present.

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Six protagonists find themselves in a refuge — or is it a shelter? or a bunker? — that is literally clinging to the top of a mountain. They speak Italian, German, (Scottish) English , and French — do they understand each other? It seems that a summit is being organised on this summit — but the outside world is shrouded in uncertainty, and so are their intentions. In the musical theatre of Christoph Marthaler, the brilliant Swiss-German director, people sing, frequently lose their way, and sometimes find what they weren’t looking for. Humour and music do the rest. Much like a Europe that is trying to find itself, there is no doubt that a summit will be reached, even if the paths to get there appear somewhat circuitous.

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Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is a classical music “hit”, a piece of music rooted in Mediterranean culture and a celebration of the continuous variations of nature. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Radouan Mriziga, accompanied by the lively and refreshing playing of violinist Amandine Beyer, explore together the infinite, generous layers of Vivaldi’s composition by choreographing a male quartet: rhythmic structures, mythological figures and symbolic arrangements trace our understanding of nature in time and space — and interrogate the alarming relationship we share with it today.

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In front of a giant green screen, a reincarnation of science fiction author Ray Bradbury embarks on a film adaptation of his Martian Chronicles, published in 1950. In this collection of stories, he recounts the colonisation of Mars, bringing with it human idealism, greed and violence. Philippe Quesne imagines the making of a deliriously retro-futuristic live theatre film, mischievously questioning the projections of science fiction, the lyricism of conquest and the mindless exploitation of resources.

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A beat (of a heart, a metronome) and then nothing: expectation, restraint, silence. Do we wait for the next one, or stop, interrupt, die — or leave room for something else? Choreographer Yasmine Hugonnet’s new piece probes time, tempo and speed, attentive to moments of brilliance and diversion. Adapting to the venue, performing in a multifrontal space, three dancers explore the rhythmic signatures of our emotions.

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What, and who, is a family? Is it a group of people who share compulsory ties, relationships of authority and memories? Where does the family begin and end? What happens to it when it is reconstituted – which relationships prevail and which are rebuilt? And what if we redefined it as a chosen family? Muriel Imbach has once again embarked on a long-term exploration, accompanied by children and philosophers, to create a show for audiences aged eight and over that mischievously mixes philosophy with fun.

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In Korea, an ordinary woman conforms to the forced banality of a patriarchal and traditionalist society. But one day, after a dream, she decides to become vegetarian. By this simple act of conviction, she challenges the oppressive frameworks that govern couples, families, desire and social order. Actress Daria Deflorian stages the unsettling novel that introduced Han Kang, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature, to Europe. A powerful yet gentle performance in which the unpretentious determination of a woman, who identifies with plants and dares to open herself up to other realities, foils the violence of even the most rigid frameworks.

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Parallel narratives intertwine: in a rather special bowling bar-club, an artist meets a music industry producer. The meeting doesn’t go well… Around them, a regular and a female customer seem to have emerged from another time, while a television set broadcasts a glitchy futuristic superhero film. Blending objectivist poetry and American cartoons, Lausanne-based company I finally found a place to call home continues its homegrown exploration of experimental narratives and improbable situations, in the purest tradition of genre films.

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The choreographer and dancer Nacera Belaza and the actress Valérie Dréville are two artists who have often presented their work at Vidy. They share a high artistic standard, a remarkable and renowned know-how and a taste for the unknown, the unexpected and for what cannot be formulated yet haunts beings, bodies and existences. They have come together for this duet — part theatre, part dance, but possibly neither — to listen to the breath at the origin of gesture and language: that full, tempo-less time during which the body is filled with words that cannot be expressed, the shadowy border between loss and spirituality.

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The Disappearing Act is a danced and musical journey into the overlooked African origins of flamenco, devised and performed by Yinka Esi Graves. A British dancer of Ghanaian and Jamaican origins, she travelled to Seville to study flamenco in greater depth. On stage, she is joined by a singer, a flamenco guitarist and a drummer to bring these forgotten stories to life, including that of Miss LaLa, the Afro-descendant circus artist immortalised by Edgar Degas. How does one erase oneself in order to exist, while refusing to be denied? Somewhere between camouflage and resistance, Yinka Esi Graves transforms the act of disappearance into an artistic gesture.

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