ARCHIVES 2018 / Dry Season

The stage is an architectural structure: a box, a confined space, a zone of imprisonment. It is painted a sterile white. There, seven women struggle. Watching, we perceive tiny openings in the walls, and in the ceiling, a mechanism that reacts to any inappropriate gesture. A living structure that serves as a constant call to order... But that's not taking into account the fact that bodies are bodies, and thus they can't help but shiver, hop up and down, or twist. Little by little, something happens, a ritual takes form. Borrowing from dance, visual arts, theatre, and anthropological cinema to create a protean artistic world, Phia Ménard leads the audience through a telluric experience which drops them at the heart of the struggles against norms and the fights to freely choose our identities. Here it is about defying patriarchal power and escaping the constraints of gender, by creating new gestures and new poetic rituals to feed our imagination.

Phia Ménard
Born in 1971 in a man's body, the future Phia Ménard began by studying juggling, acting, and modern dance, before founding in 1998 the company Non Nova. After becoming a woman in 2008, her search for what she calls the “Complementary Unjugglability of Elements” led her to explore ice, water, air, and their influence on human behaviour. Dry Season is the continuation of this organic cycle, following shows like P.P.P. (2008), Vortex (2011), Belle d'Hier (2015), Les Os Noirs (2017), or Et In Arcadia Ego, which she directed last winter at the Opéra Comique.