t u m u l u s

The choreographer François Chaignaud and the director of Cris de Paris, Geoffroy Jourdain, bring us this piece for thirteen performers - thirteen singing and dancing bodies. t u m u l u s is a never-ending procession blended with the power of polyphonic singing. It is always in a state of perpetual movement, like the act of breathing itself, and is a true celebration of the absent.

In the middle of the stage, the floor rises up into a grassy hump. It is a mausoleum, a tumulus, an ancient tomb covered over with a hill. It constitutes a lansdscape which turns the place of death and the dead into that of life and the living. A place where the onstage bodies appear and disappear, this space becomes a theatrical mechanism, a playground for visual and choreographic experimentation. In their piece t u m u l u s, François Chaignaud and Geoffroy Jourdain blend their respective artistic practices into a single movement: a procession in which the singing and dancing make visible the invisible and reveal the experience of a perpetual movement. Polyphonic singing, ranging from the Renaissance up to the 1970’s, resonates in the moving, pulsating bodies. In these musical works, spiritual inspiration, linked to grieving and consolation, composes a celebration to bodies which have since departed. On the stage, t u m u l u s conjures up an image of a community of the living, sharing, from the place of death itself, the immense joy of the fragility and non-permanence our very selves.

Photo : © Christophe Raynaud de Lage