Brûler

The planet is burning. What would Lucy, the three-million-year-old Australopithecus discovered in the Ethiopian desert in 1974, have to say? Here she is summoned to the heart of an immersive performance that questions the fantasy of our origins as well as our finiteness and our desire to transcend it. Somewhere between archaeology and future-oriented impulses. 

As the audience roams freely through a space transformed into an excavation site, a voice emerges, that of American soprano Claron McFadden, who conjures up Lucy and the fiction surrounding this ancestral figure: who would she be if she returned today, and how would she view the world we live in? Words, songs, gestures and movements, video footage, visual creations, sounds and music unfurl in a sensory constellation to create a vast metaphorical body. At stake: a history of humanity caught off guard by its own existence, torn between the awareness of its inevitable demise and the transhumanist desire to extend life indefinitely. 

Going back in time, superimposing and extending timelines. Summoning the past to question the present. Lighting the flame of a future that is searching for itself in a world whose end is constantly being predicted. This is the intention that drives the team of artists brought together by Jorge León, in a complex and invigorating collage of related artistic disciplines. Singer Claron McFadden, choreographer Simone Aughterlony, composer DJ Rokia Bamba as well as the writer Caroline Lamarche, performer Castélie Yalombo and eight other young performers work with the Brussels director and film-maker to articulate a dramaturgy of the fragmentary within a practice of the present moment.

Première
Création Studio Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles
Corealisation Les Halles de Schaerbeek, Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles