Once upon a time there was Lucy, the 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus discovered by American and French researchers in 1974 at the Hadar site in Ethiopia. The researchers had been listening over and over to ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ by The Beatles when the fifty-two bones were excavated. 

It’s not just a nice story, however, but also a mystery story … To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of Lucy, director Jorge León explores these questions in the installation / performance Brûler, which combines theatre, dance, song and live music. A marvel of a show for all audiences that is to be experienced as a walk, both individual and collective, through a vast animated space where each element is important. And where memory is neither ‘linear’ nor ‘a museum object’ … Rather, it is an energy, a poetics of relationships, in the present …

Where does your interest in Lucy the Australopithecus come from?

The idea for Brûler came to me during the End Of Death symposium held at Bozar in 2019. I had been invited to share my experience as the maker of the film Before We Go (2018), which was conceived with artists and people who were at life’s end. At the symposium I met a series of transhumanist ideologues who believe that death is a disease that will one day be eradicated. This struck me as unreal given that we are constantly being told that human life on Earth is coming to an end.

This fantasy of immortality naturally led me to take an interest in the myth of our origins. I remembered the pictures I had seen in the history books I looked through as a child. They claimed that Lucy the Australopithecus – whom Ethiopians call Dinknesh, which means ‘you are marvellous’ – was the mother of humankind. This comes down to putting forward a universalist vision of the world. I’m more in favour of a pluriversalist vision, of a more complex, more uncertain reality (smiles). The way Lucy has been portrayed in newspapers, textbooks and museums may in fact say more about us than about her

On closer inspection, the narrative is extremely well constructed and ideological. Why call the Australopithecus ‘Lucy’? Why claim that her gender was female? Especially as no traces of DNA have been detected in her fossilized bones. Questioning the figure of Lucy in the context of an artistic rather than a scientific project allows us to remain curious, to deconstruct a myth, to bring out new ideas and alternative narratives.

The creative process behind Brûler involved excavations that were of an almost archaeological nature.

I wanted the performance space to resemble a large worksite, at once a creative studio and an excavation site, a place where forms are being developed, are in the process of becoming. The unfinished interests me in that it holds a promise.

When I learned that a large part of the reserves of the Théâtre National were going to be destroyed, I thought it would be interesting for the show to consist of stage elements from previous theatrical productions that are no longer relevant, no longer on tour, but that we could bring back to life. We literally dug through these reserves and took out the stage elements found on stage today and which make up the setting for Brûler.

— Extract from an interview conducted by Sylvia Botella in September 2024