autumn 2024 program
August 29 → September 13, 2024
SPOT Festival #11
A highlight dedicated to teams and new forms, the SPOT festival returns to the Théâtre Paris-Villette for its eleventh edition!
Run, grow, fight, dream… together! For this new edition, it’s otherness that brings us together. When what distinguishes us unites us rather than divides us, differences become a source of humor and poetry. The eleventh edition will be a very « special » one, in partnership with the Paris Paralympic Games. All the festival’s events will be free of charge, so we can all get together in the last days of August.
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August 29 → 30, 2024 • 8:00 pm
Personne n’est ensemble, sauf moi (Nobody’s together but me) • Compagnie Amonine / Clea Petrolesi
1h15 • book
Aldric, Oussama, Clarisse and Léa have just emerged from adolescence, with an invisible disability in common. What do they have to say at the dawn of their adult lives? The show plunges us into the creativity of their solitude and the maturity of their childhood, shaking up our certainties. Professional actors, a live musician and actors with disabilities create a theater where normality doesn’t exist, but which forcefully questions it.
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Sept 3 → 4, 2024 • 8:00 pm
Craving • Compagnie Terra Forma – Laurie Iversen
1h • book
Craving is the struggle of a young woman whose father suffers from alcoholism. Craving is also about managing the insane situations she encounters: feeding him vodka to prevent delirium tremens, buying him diapers, improvising as a nurse, secretary, addictologist… How do you stay strong? Why stay? How do you deal with relapses? How do you help someone who doesn’t want help? Probably by clinging to the good memories and music they used to play together, and above all by telling herself that what she’s going through is no exception, and that she’s not alone.
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Sept 6 → 7, 2024 • 8:00 pm
Cultures Clubs • Cette Compagnie-Là – Antony Quenet
1h15 • book
Cultures Clubs imagines a sports fiction in which several athletes of the future live in a world where liberal utopia/dystopia has prevailed. If it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, we might as well imagine a capitalism that has reached its finality, where human relationships are regulated by a market that has finally become perfect. To the sounds of bodies and machines, where everything, from love to work, is sport, this world draws an ecstatic sprint towards a happiness where only a single, hammered pulse remains, the dictatorship of a permanent moment leading to inertia.
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Sept 9 → 10, 2024 • 8:00 pm
Isabelle • Compagnie Oh ! Oui – Joachim Latarjet et Alexandra Fleischer
1h25 • book
Isabelle wanted to split her mother in two with an axe. Isabelle threw a gigantic dish of chocolate mousse in her father’s face. Isabelle speaks loudly, screams loudly. Isabelle offers grenadines to her nephew every day. Isabelle is 7 years old. In reality, Isabelle is 45. Nobody knows what’s wrong with Isabelle. Except those closest to her, who do. They know what’s wrong with her, what she’s caught, what caught her as a child, just 3 years old. Isabelle is not like us.
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Sept 12 → 13, 2024 • 8:00 pm
A Handbook for the Israeli Theatre Director in Europe • Hannan Ishay, Ido Shaked
1h10 • in English with French surtitles • book
Ido and Hannan are both Israeli theater directors. One lives in Paris, the other in Tel Aviv. In 2023, they set themselves a challenge: to create a play about their neurotic, half-mad homeland, on the brink of totalitarianism, but nonetheless somehow loved. But when, on October 7, in the middle of a rehearsal, a new war breaks out and catastrophe is unleashed, reality overtakes all fiction. The staging of a humorous, ironic and fictional history of the Middle East becomes a journey through one of its darkest periods.
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+ avant-scènes → spotlight on creations in progress (work in progress, reading, extract)
With Souterrain • compagnie Tornero / Raphaël Bocobza – Close • compagnie Lencre / Pierre Pfauwadel – Les Piliers de la société • Nouveau Collectif – Le Conte d’hiver • compagnie Mauvais Sang – Camille Bernon, Hugo Merck.
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September 26 → October 12, 2024
presented by La Villette and Théâtre Paris-Villette
Quichotte
Gwenaël Morin, based on Don Quichotte de La Manche, Miguel de Cervantes
1h45 • book
Gwenaël Morin takes on the most famous of picaresque novels, setting Quichotte in a theater of cruelty and the sublimation of differences.
Driven by his obsession with books of chivalry, Alonso Quichano becomes a knight errant and travels across Spain to fight evil, which he sees everywhere – including in harmless windmills. The story is well known, from the great novel written by Miguel de Cervantes in the early 17th century. Also armed with his own literary fictions, Gwenaël Morin tackles this monument, alongside Jeanne Balibar, Thierry Dupont and Marie-Noëlle Genod. But contrary to the gentle vision often given, the director proposes a reading as close as possible to a text in which Quixote is the victim of a frantic succession of brutalities and humiliations, sometimes inflicted gratuitously to take advantage of his credulity and blindness. But if the effects of his resistance are derisory and futile, his madness is necessary, liberating and healthy. Quichotte is the second part of the cycle Démonter les remparts pour finir le pont, initiated with the Festival d’Avignon and inaugurated with the unforgettable Le Songe, presented at La Villette in autumn 2023. Or how to tell unbearable stories that set us free.
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October 17 → November 3, 2024
Océan
Angélique Friant
Ages 2 and up
30 min • book
A dreamlike journey to meet the creatures that inhabit the seabed.
The ocean, a vast and mysterious world, known to all yet largely unexplored, is a place of endless adventure and discovery, an inexhaustible source of the imagination, where a thousand stories are possible. In this show, a mix of colorful shadow theater, puppets, video and soundscapes, a lonely little girl plunges into a crevasse to rescue her shell from the water…
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October 18 → November 3, 2024
Oiseau (bird)
Anna Nozière
Ages 9 and up
1h05 • book
Mustafa loses his dad. In her class, Paméla has also lost someone: her dog. With this in common, they become inseparable. When they meet little Françou, a first-grader who knows how to get to the other side, the hope of seeing father and dog again wins them over. The movement to communicate with the dead is underway, and it’s about to sweep through the whole school and send the adults into a frenzy!
Rather than bury our departed in oblivion, Anna Nozière and her team give them a place of honor in a joyful show full of humor and poetry.
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November 8 → 23, 2024
Delphine et Carole
Marie Rémond, Caroline Arrouas
1h20 • book
1974, Carole Roussopoulos has just bought Sony’s latest Portapak camera and is giving video courses to groups of women. Delphine Seyrig has signed up. They don’t know each other. Using Callisto McNulty’s documentary Delphine et Carole, insoumuses as a basis, Marie and Caroline superimpose the eras. They take it in turns to be Delphine and Carole, Marie and Caroline, drawing on the former’s impertinence, creativity, humor and anger, the better to echo the words of yesterday and today.
It’s the story of a meeting. Camera in hand, they discover the subversive use of the camera. They invent, create, edit and broadcast. The adventure begins.b
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November 27 → December 7, 2024
4.48 Psychose
Florent Siaud, Sarah Kane
1h • book
Following the success of the show when it was presented at the TPV in 2018, 4.48 Psychose is back for ten exceptional performances! A sulphurous figure in British playwriting, 4.48 Psychose is Sarah Kane’s final text. Behind the poetic outbursts of this text, traversed by the intuition of death as well as by a powerful drive for life, emerges the voice of a brilliant woman who wants to remain honest with herself, without conforming to a dominant discourse that marginalizes those who deviate from its norms.
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December 13, 2024 → January 5, 2025
Cartoon ou n’essayez pas ça chez vous ! (Cartoon or don’t try this at home!)
Odile Grosset-Grange, Mike Kenny
Ages 7 and up
1h10 • book
The Normal family includes the parents, Norman and Norma, Jimmy, Dorothy, a baby, a dog and a goldfish. Everything normal! Except not at all, they’re Cartoons whose lives are governed by other rules: the animals talk, and every morning everything starts all over again. They never feel pain, never age and never die. One day, Jimmy accidentally drinks a potion that turns him into a human. What if, in order to avoid a goldfish’s life where everything starts again eternally, we also had to accept to change, to grow, to suffer sometimes? What is it to live?
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December 19, 2024 → January 5, 2025
Mille secrets de poussins (A thousand chick secrets)
Collectif Quatre Ailes/Claude Ponti
Ages 3 and up
25 min • book
As soon as there’s a book somewhere, there are chicks in it… Mille secrets de poussins showcases children’s imaginations as a space for all possibilities. In a theatrical and multimedia setting inhabited by a prankster actor who is both storyteller and manipulator, the show draws on word, visual and sound games inspired by the poetic universe of Claude Ponti.
Travelling to the other side of the books, spectators meet the chicks and their magical world.