Machine à Spectacle

Inspired by the world of cinema and the figure of the stunt performer, Solène Wachter explores the links between dance and stunt work: two practices in which intense physical exertion works to further an illusion, and in which a disciplined body performs either anonymously or in service of another. In Machine à Spectacle, five dancers alternate between performance and substitution to sustain the illusion of a continuous choreography, endlessly blurring the boundaries between real and fake. Technical equipment becomes a participant in its own right as ropes, cables, metal structures and hidden winches extend movement into an interplay between the living and nonliving. An interlocking system of bodies and metal, the stage transforms into a complex chain of components all charged with tension. With subtle lighting and stagecraft, the choreography interrogates our fascination with spectacle and risk—the unstable threshold where fiction and reality lose distinction.