Brûler

Performance – Installation – Music

How do works of art, be they visual, literary or musical, relate conceptually to the question of finitude?

The planet is burning. What would Lucy, the three-million-year-old Australopithecus discovered in the Ethiopian desert in 1974, have to say? Here she is summoned to the heart of an immersive performance that questions the fantasy of our origins as well as our finiteness and our desire to transcend it. Somewhere between archaeology and future-oriented impulses. 

As the audience roams freely through a space transformed into an excavation site, a voice emerges, that of American soprano Claron McFadden, who conjures up Lucy and the fiction surrounding this ancestral figure: who would she be if she returned today, and how would she view the world we live in? Words, songs, gestures and movements, video footage, visual creations, sounds and music unfurl in a sensory constellation to create a vast metaphorical body. At stake: a history of humanity caught off guard by its own existence, torn between the awareness of its inevitable demise and the transhumanist desire to extend life indefinitely. 

Going back in time, superimposing and extending timelines. Summoning the past to question the present. Lighting the flame of a future that is searching for itself in a world whose end is constantly being predicted. This is the intention that drives the team of artists brought together by Jorge León, in a complex and invigorating collage of related artistic disciplines. Singer Claron McFadden, choreographer Simone Aughterlony, composer DJ Rokia Bamba as well as the writer Caroline Lamarche, performer Milka Kongi and eight other young performers work with the Brussels director and film-maker to articulate a dramaturgy of the fragmentary within a practice of the present moment.

Genesis

The idea of Brûler came about during the The End Of Death conference at Bozar in 2019. I was invited there to share my experience as director of the film Before We Go (2018) created with artists and people at the end of life. I mentioned, among other things, the extent to which the Western narrative is driven by the question of the end. How are works of art, be they visual, literary or musical conceived in relation to the notion of finitude? It was there that I met Aubrey de Grey, an ideologue of transhumanism who basically told the audience: “The end of the end is only a matter of time. Death is just a disease that will eventually be cured. The human being who will live to be 400 years old has already been born. He may be among us, in the audience.”

Beyond the scientistic vision promoted by transhumanists, and which is ultimately just the umpteenth version of a regularly rehashed story, what particularly challenged me was the collision between the fantasy of immortal life and the alarming daily announcement warnings we receive about humanity’s extinction. It is precisely this paradox that inspired my work. It has already generated a series of phases that I would like to now bring together in the context of the piece Brûler, starting with the figure of Lucy. Admittedly, Lucy is but an incomplete skeleton, an architecture of fossil bones and air. But it is precisely this lack, the poetics of absence that allows us to give body and voice to Lucy. A way of also materializing the fantasy of our origins. A way to further question our own finitude that we share with all living beings. And above all, our desire to transcend it.

Première 12.09.2024
Performances 12.09.2024 > 15.09.2024 at Les Halles de Schaerbeek
In search of coproduction partners