Le banquet des mondes d’après (The New Worlds Banquet) was created in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis. The pillars of live performance – the spirit of sharing, the joy of communing together, the collective celebration – were threatening to collapse in the face of fear of contamination, social distancing and barrier gestures. The period seemed to separate two eras, inviting us to rethink the world in order to learn from the past, paint a portrait of the present and, above all, dream the future together.
Les banquets des mondes d’après are performances in the form of meals in which the guests are nourished by odors, dreams or waste.
For each performance installation, part of the audience can sit at the table (between 12 and 50 guests) and take full part in the experience. The rest of the audience sits around the table. We come together for a meal to give a collective sense of sharing our vision of the future. Just like a big family.
Three different versions are available:
Per Fumum: a banquet of smells
Using olfactory theater, the artists, masters of ceremony, plunge participants into the spaces and times of their olfactory memory. Smells are involved in all our emotions, influence our behavior, make life pleasant or repulsive, and are even nourishing. They govern our emotional life by touching the deepest part of our brain, stimulating evoked associations, frightening, enchanting or exciting us. Today more than ever, it would seem that our world needs to be re-parfumed. So take a seat at the table and let’s work together.
Holy Groom: the banquet of collective dreams
A mysterious video oracle serves up dreams in the form of images, just like refined dishes. The guests, members of a very strange family, eat these dreams by feeding on the images that scroll across the various TV screens. Carried away by their whirlwind, they contribute to composing a new collective dream. At the end of the meal, they’re off to a new future.
In Utéro: the waste banquet
A post-consumerist feast with a wacky industrial aesthetic. The guests at this gargantuan banquet savor our life of (over)consumption. Gargamelle gives birth to Gargantua and thus to a part of the world… inviting the powerful (the audience) to the birth of the offspring of our system. The banquet becomes a waste-recycling factory, the sorting line starts up and the guests become the workers who sort, clean and recycle… indirectly questioning each person’s share of responsibility for the state of our society, dead drunk on an orgy of over-consumerism.
These different versions of the banquet are inspired by the characters in our web series Do Not Disturb. Created in 2021 following a dream-gathering residency in a downtown Marseille hotel that housed people rehoused after the collapse of the Rue d’Aubagne buildings. The collected dreams fed into the scenarios of the series, drawing fantastic visions of the worlds after.
To be performed in a square, a courtyard, a third place, a factory, a meadow, a theater…
An immersive artistic experience inspired by real-life testimonies. This is the aspiration of this creation: to make the future legible.
As part of the project, cultural awareness-raising activities are possible in the form of “Collecte Service”, “Assemblées du futur” or “Dream Service” workshops, in groups of 10 to 15. The aim is to nurture our capacity for self-transformation. An invitation to immerse yourself in an experience. Invent unique memories, autobiographical or fictional, in the eyes of others and yourself, in an artistic installation. This trans-disciplinary playground is the object of a physical, poetic, theatrical, olfactory and ecological approach, so that each participant can find his or her own mode of artistic expression.