Austerlitz

The project takes the title of a book by German author W. G. Sebald. However, we will not follow the quest pursued by the main character but rather the contours of his wanderings : the roving of an impaired memory inhabited by scattered fragments gruellingly pieced together through shifts and chance encounters, unwrapped by Sebald as a peculiar puzzle dotted with black and white photographs.

Austerlitz’s slant journey, made up of obscure digressions and associations, is presented here as that of the seven performers on stage; a kind of collective autobiographical enterprise, enriched with archival images, that establishes links between Agnès Varda and post-modern dance, between Aby Warburg and Loïe Fuller’s serpentine dances, between Vaslav Nijinsky and psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, between colonisation and amnesia, between the Second World War and the German punk movement.

Links that warm or chill the heart, imparted through songs specially composed for the show.