Choreographer Mathilde Monnier's Feminist Manifesto Comes to Agora De La Danse

Revelation of the 2023 Festival d'Avignon, acclaimed in Europe and honored with the Grand Prix de la Critique Française – Best Show 2023 and the Grand Prix du syndicat professionnel de la critique française 2024, the show BLACK LIGHTS by French choreographer Mathilde Monnier is coming to Montreal for four performances at Agora de la danse, from October 22 to 25, 2025.

Freely inspired by the television series H24 (Arte, 2021), BLACK LIGHTS is a show-series-manifesto that highlights the violence women face on a daily basis. Eight performers, including Mathilde Monnier herself, take turns embodying rage, pain, but also female strength and resistance. Based on real stories, their voices testify: one forced to wear heels at work; another insulted in the street; yet another victim of harassment or burned by her partner. These fragments of life, adapted with sharpness from texts by renowned authors such as Lola Lafon, Siri Hustvedt, Alice Zeniter, Fabienne Kanor, or Ersi Sotiropoulos, become bodies, gestures, and movements.

With radical and refined stage writing, Monnier—who has created more than fifty shows in a forty-year career—composes a theatrical and choreographic work of rare intensity. BLACK LIGHTS speaks as much through words as through silences, as much through gestures as through glances: one after another, the performers raise their voices and expose their scars. The result: a necessary feminist plea, a powerful artistic gesture that challenges our times.