"We liked the idea of making the audience part of the set design"

You want to create unique fusions and crossovers between choreographic practice, the visual arts and microbiology; what form will this take on stage? 

We hope that what the audience gets is a (joyful) mix! The idea is to blur the lines, to engage the audience’s imagination in order to de-anthropocentrise their perspectives, their ways of seeing things and receiving them. How can eight dancers suddenly become a single microscopic being? How can bodies arranged in space become a mountain range, containing billions of living beings? How can we also come to see ourselves for what we are, namely a fully-fledged ecosystem, sustained by unlikely inter-species collaborations!

How did you work with the seven performers? 

We shared material that seemed meaningful to us in order to achieve these hybridisations, these perceptual disturbances, but we also created a shared imagination, which is expressed uniquely by each individual.

We worked on movement, of course, but also on relationships outside the studio with other forms of life, which further enrich the experience and inhabit the stage with us.
 

What are your choreographic inspirations? 

We are mainly inspired by everything that isn’t dance—any practice or behaviour that can shift our imaginations or our ways of thinking, seeing, and being in the world. This ranges from highly advanced computer hacking techniques that create completely absurd images, to the behaviour of an amoeba phagocytosing a tiny organism

What is the stage setup? 

To convey the different possible perspectives (or ‘points of life’!), we’ve created a slightly deconstructed set-up, with platforms on stage from which some audience members can watch the performance. We liked the idea of making the audience part of the set design, just as we often view the nature around us as a backdrop…! Turning that perspective on its head!
 

For this production, you worked with microbiology researchers Nathalie Delzenne and René Rezsohazy from UCL. What did you learn? What were you looking for? 

They first informed us in a more vivid way than books or the internet on the subjects that interested us. They also confirmed that despite the distances we often automatically place between art and science, and between choreographic and scientific research, everything is ultimately quite close, and steeped in creativity! Above all, we were seeking to understand what impact a deep understanding of these microscopic phenomena of inter-species interactions—which constitute us—might have on scientists’ perception of the world…!