Flesh

The human body is not just an architectural shell made of organic materials. It is its root identity. Its flesh embodies its being-in-the-world, its living anchor. However, in the eyes of our contemporary society, this body anchoring tends to disappear. The body has become a kind of “ other ” with which we must constantly negotiate. Through its flesh, the human body offers a reading of our lived experience. It is through this flesh that we exist in relation to others. This flesh "speaks" sometimes long before our words and intellect.

Wounded flesh, raw, violated, transformed, extraordinary, out of the ordinary, captivating, reborn, in need, isolated, tender… In Flesh, the characters are marked through their flesh. Their flesh speaks to express the life force that animates them. Each character moves forward, not without risks, in social, familial, intimate, personal interactions that are more or less solid, with varying relationships to themselves and others.

Flesh aims to stretch this interwoven flesh and expose it to the audience. The body, a central figure in our theatre, forcefully reminds us of the infinite precariousness of existence. Naked flesh enters the scene, fragile and imperfect, constantly revealing the passing of time and the dying of being. Our theatre allows us to open up bodies, to mishandle them, to make blood pour out, to lead them to death and bring them back. We can scrape these bodies against the world to bring forth the need for existence. Our theatre seeks to be an unbearable transgression for our Western societies ; life, death, suffering, poetry, and humor collide throughout our stories. We must, always in front of witnesses, burst the opacity of the skin that separates us from the world.

Through the collective experience that theatre enables, using flesh as the foundation of our theatrical vocabulary and as a site for human experimentation - both from the side of the spectators and the performers - we depict a world that is grating and off-kilter, where everything goes terribly wrong. Flesh, a visual and non-verbal performance, swings between realism, tragicomedy, and phantasmagoria.

Through Flesh, it is the life force that we want to make burst under the spectators’s gaze. Life is an unconsidered risk taken by us, the living. Our visual, wordless theatre takes the risk of seizing these solitudes to reveal the need for the collective, the necessity of the bond between individuals. Constantly, in our theatre and even more so in Flesh, we emphasize this need for connection, for relationship with others, with the human species, to regain this trust with ourselves and others ; we are all risks to each other.