Adieu & Merci

The performance is over, the lights come on. The audience begins to applaud. The dancer returns to the stage and greets the audience. What exactly happens at such a moment? Are we still in the performance or is it already over - or are we on the borderline between the two? What is behind the performer's movement: bowing and thanking the audience for its approval? 

To highlight this particular theatrical code, Latifa Laâbissi puts herself in the shoes of a paradoxical figure that allows her to traverse the historical, aesthetic and subjective layers of the greeting: at the same time herself and a host of others who have preceded her, she glides between identities and registers. 

With Adieu et Merci, Laâbissi brings a meticulous choreography of traces and bends, with stories within stories within stories. In this end without end, which repeatedly performs a different variation of the same greeting, stories intertwine and memories emerge.

• In her work, Latifa Laâbissi mixes and rethinks genres and formats. Stories, figures and voices come together in an anthropolgic landscape, in which traces of contemporary society shine through. Just as in her previous performances, in Adieu et Merci she delves into the subconscious of dance to reveal its blind spots.

Note: This performance contains nudity.