The Pyre at La Monnaie

By mixing theatre, dance, puppetry and the visual arts, the Franco- Austrian Gisèle Vienne develops a polymorphic work of spellbinding strangeness. Her shows and her installations shift the frontiers between appearance and reality and play with the illusions of representation to open the way to a ‘different’ stage: that of our fears, our fantasies and our secrets... In her new creation, The Pyre, produced in collaboration with the writer Dennis Cooper, she questions our ways of understanding and interpreting the world through two mute characters, a dancer and a young boy, brought together in a space sculpted by light, sound and music. Pushing choreographic abstraction to the point of a tableau vivant, she slips into theatrical storytelling, then from storytelling into reality. An intriguing game that challenges our senses and our sense of meaning.