Christian et François Ben Aïm

For over 20 years, Christian and François Ben Aïm have been building a body of work rich in poetry and rigour, fraternal ties and singularity.

After multi-disciplinary training in dance, physical theatre and circus, each followed his own path as a performer, before the two brothers got together to create À l’abri du regard des hommes, avant d’aller mourir ailleurs, a hybrid dance-theatre piece that marked the start of their collaboration in 1997. This was to be followed by some thirty plays that are as much rooted in their work in the field as they are international. They draw their inspiration from literary, musical and pictorial sources, intimately blending artistic disciplines on stage: En plein cœur (2006), Valse en trois temps (2010), L’Ogresse des archives et son chien (2011), La Légèreté des tempêtes (2014), Brûlent nos cœurs insoumis (2017), Mirages – les âmes boréales (2018), Arise (2019), FACÉTIES (2021), Tendre colère (2025).

The dance of the Ben Aïm brothers is marked by uncompromising energy and calls on the performer to develop an intimate relationship with movement. It is more than a discourse, it is an experience, a journey that the performer makes before our very eyes, each time with the sincerity of a full and complete presence. Exploring fraternity, desire and emancipation in all their contradictory richness, questioning norms in all their ambivalence, they approach each piece as an exercise in imbalance; an experiment in which the challenge is to approach the void, seen as the place of renewed openness.

Through a subtle effect of empathy and contamination, the choreographers take us into a world where nothing is stable, where everything is the object of poetic and sensitive questioning, where truths are disturbed and reinvented; a world to be questioned together.