Derniers Feux presents the audience with a turning point, a moment when everything can change… How did you build a performance on such an elusive foundation?
This show is the result of an exploration of beginnings and endings, of the ephemeral and the intangible. It tells the story of a show coming into being, of a community trying to come together, of a dream striving to exist. For this creation, I wanted to work around the idea of fireworks, both through the images they evoke and the tension that surrounds them: the fear of danger, the emotion and joy they provoke, that second of eternity, that ephemerality, as Jean Giono writes in Un roi sans divertissement (A King Alone). Derniers Feux is also a reflection on performance itself and its role in society. What do we expect from a show, from artists? And if we were to create one final performance together, what might it look like? The ten performers gathered around me dance, play music, construct and dismantle the set. They are all at once technicians, performers, and spectators. They are constantly in motion. Dance is so central that we almost forget it's there: it becomes a mode of existence, the thread connecting the images that appear and vanish. Another key inspiration for Derniers Feux is how Fellini speaks about his art in the films 8½ and Intervista. He shares his doubts, and shows a group of people coming together to give life to dreams and nightmares, confronting emptiness with imagination. A mise en abyme of cinema, a film within a film. Derniers Feux is a performance about the creation of a performance.
In your previous shows, you often left the theatre, especially to engage with post-industrial urban sites. With Derniers Feux, you are returning to the theatrical space…
Indeed, my projects have often taken place in situ. For Forêt, we developed, with choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, a promenade piece performed in the Denon wing of the Louvre Museum. With 900 Something Days Spent in the XXth Century, I moved through various sites corresponding to different types of industrial remnants from the past century. Occupying spaces not originally intended for dance is the starting point for many of my projects. I have an organic urge to use everything around me as a playground. With Derniers Feux, I continue this process by anchoring these fundamental principles within the theatre space and what it says about us today. This is especially true in Avignon, a city that, for one month, transforms itself to welcome an entire ephemeral artistic community. In this performance, I want to make use of the theatre space with the same tools I usually use in other locations.
Your productions often sit at the intersection of several artistic fields. How would you describe yourself? As a choreographer?
Yes, I would say I’m a choreographer… but not only that. Dance and performance are at the heart of my projects, but I think that in my approach, I aim to choreograph everything else as well. At just thirty years old, I want who I am to emerge through my process rather than define myself too quickly. As a child, one of my favourite games was pretending to create shows. With the neighbourhood kids where I grew up, near Orléans, we organised our own festival the year we turned twelve. Later, I discovered dance and choreography, which felt like a beautiful space of freedom to keep creating, with the different ways of being together it provides. In recent years, I’ve begun to imagine my projects as spaces of encounter, as much with the audience as with all the professions of the performing arts. Jean Vilar used the word régisseur. I find that term interesting. A régisseur organises a show both technically and artistically. Surrounded by their team, they carry a shared artistic vision. That’s the essence of my work: bringing a group together around a shared imagination, drawing on scenography, dance, time, music, theatre, performance, text, and so on. So, to answer your question, maybe we could say I’m a régisseur.
For the costumes, you collaborated with the house of ISSEY MIYAKE.
I’ve been working with Satoshi Kondo for some time. In 2023, together with the contemporary music ensemble Ictus, I created a performance, Grasping the Formless, for Issey Miyake’s spring/summer collection. Satoshi’s vision organically aligned with the fundamental principles of Derniers Feux. In the way he conceives and creates clothing, there’s a sense of the immaterial, the ephemeral: he starts from a single material to imagine fifteen different garments. Many aspects of his work evoke childhood, as if the costumes became shelters, little huts, ways to transform and play together.
Interview conducted by Vanessa Asse in February 2025