EXTRA LIFE

In this new piece, EXTRA LIFE, the director and choreographer Gisèle Vienne furthers her rigorous, moving work into the deconstruction of perceptive frameworks, and narrative and psychic structures. 

At the end of a night spent partying, a sister and brother find each other. Twenty years previously, when they were still children, they were united by a fusional link that was to be torn apart by a dramatic event. Acknowledging the collapse of the system which provoked this traumatic experience, the two adults, endowed with a newly-found sensibility and capacity for analysis, draw up a range of actions and possible future. In EXTRA LIFE, Gisèle Vienne pursues her investigations into systems of perception. By developing and unfurling the experience of this life-changing moment, this opening-up of the senses, the choreographer invents a form in which the different strata of the present experience come into contact: past, present, anticipated future, memory construction, and the imagination. An extremely dense choreographic piece, EXTRA LIFE was devised via the articulation of propositions from the performers themselves, with the music by Caterina Barbieri, sound design by Adrien Michel and lighting by Yves Godin. In order to formulate the perceptive hierarchies, Gisèle Vienne makes use of a system of collages, developed in conjunction with the performers Katia Petrowick, Adèle Haenel and Theo Livesey. We are confronted with a stage language of a unique kind, in which the sense-led experiences nourish possibilities for the thought and spoken word.

Text : © Vincent Théval