Le vertige du papillon

Le Vertige du Papillon, the third show by the circus company Feria Musica, brings together seven acrobats-trapeze artists and four musicians, in a mixture of harmony and turbulence, take-off and imbalance; between fall… and rebound.

A butterfly breaks free of its chrysalis for a single day of life and sees the world through a prism of over-bright colours. What we too often take for an elegant carefree dance, from tree to flower, is in fact only a symptom of the butterfly’s dizziness: the instant that precedes its fall.

Le Vertige du Papillon, the third show by the circus company Feria Musica, brings together seven acrobats-trapeze artists and four musicians, in a mixture of harmony and turbulence, take-off and imbalance; between fall… and rebound. Together they confront instability, tell us about it and explore its infinite variations: I seize you around the waist, you lose yourself in suspended flight, he or she suddenly springs off the trampoline, we dance… Together they enjoy outsmarting the circus, venturing into forbidden zones, such as that, for example, of an acrobat subject to an irresistible dizziness. Then dance is born from the fall, and the circus is reborn from the dance. And if that makes the show somewhat “impure” and impossible to classify, it is nevertheless total, both successive and simultaneous.

Le Vertige du Papillon is choreographed by Fatou Traoré and mixes music, dance and circus in a stage area enriched with many possibilities, equipped with trapdoors and secret exits. Masts and an aerial cradle rise up somewhere between earth and sky, the front of the stage is a slope, a removable dance floor pulls back to reveal a trampoline. Ephemeral encounters happen, movements are interrupted; imbalance offers new trajectories, triggers a series of events, and encourages the use of various circus techniques: juggling, swinging aerial silk, Chinese pole, aerobatics. Throughout, in the ceaseless movement of bodies, can be discerned the shimmering of a butterfly wing.