Machine à spectacle

In her new creation Machine à spectacle, Solène Wachter explores the art of stuntwork: between invisible know-how, real risk-taking and a fascination with the spectacle of danger.

Inspired by the world of cinema and the figure of the stuntwoman, Solène Wachter explores the close links between dance and stuntwork: two practices where intense physical commitment can be put at the service of an illusion, where the virtuoso body acts without a name, sometimes in the service of another. Between physical performance and substitution effects, five performers orchestrate a meticulous relay of efforts to maintain the illusion of continuous choreography, constantly blurring the lines between real and fake. On stage, the technical machine becomes a partner: ropes, cables, metal structures and concealed winches extend the gestures in a writing between the living and the inanimate. The stage becomes a gear of bodies and metal, a chain of precise actions where tension creeps into every cog. Deploying a subtle mechanics of light and artifice, the choreographer questions our fascination with the spectacle of risk, that unstable threshold where fiction and reality merge.