De l’hêtre à l’être

DE L’HÊTRE A L’ÊTRE

Choreographic, musical, and visual writing

from 6 years old

Conception and direction: Laurent Dupont

Interpretation: two dancers and one video/visual artist (to be confirmed)

Text: Céline Bellanger

Music creation: to be confirmed

Set design: Patricia Lacoulonche

Lighting design: Christian Goulin

TO BE CREATED AUTUMN 2025

Production : ACTA, conventioned company: Conseil départemental du Val d’Oise, City of Villiers-le-Bel. ACTA is subsidised by the DRAC Île-de-France through a territory convention, and by the Île-de-France Regional Council through an artistic permanence convention.

Co-productions : Villiers-le-Bel (95)

The second part of Laurent Dupont’s dyptic on the theme of trees, “De l’hêtre à l’être” (“From beech to being“) takes a fresh look at these very beings that surround and nourish us, through a sensitive dialogue between two dancers, from their initial encounter to their slow transformation.

The plant imagery becomes the working tool that enriches the possibilities of their bodies and their movements: a disposition to occupy space and to make space. They will be nourished by the weight, volume, growth and roots of the tree. Like the tree, the artists express their way of being in the world through their bodies. By showing themselves, they reveal the fundamental dynamics of every being: the attraction of gravity, the reaction of slenderness and the tension of holding the vertical.

Electroacoustic proposals for the creation of a sound and musical landscape will be created in advance to evoke this hidden world of the forest, and echoed with visual elements created and projected in real time. These virtual images, evoking the birth of a forest and its ever-changing landscapes, will also enable the artist involved to engage in a dialogue with the two dancers, playing on their positions and rhythms and provoking their gazes.

A theatrical and visual game will take place to provoke and enrich the meeting of these two beings and their struggles, while welcoming them into the space of their transfiguration.

Artistic document (in French)

News around the show

  • Children and nature: dance workshops
    For two weeks, pupils from Ferdinand Buisson and Jean Jaurès nursery schools had the opportunity to deepen their understanding of living things and the figure of the tree by exploring it through their bodies guided by the dancers Maxime Renaud and Kostia Cerda. With just a few months to go before the creation of De… Read more: Children and nature: dance workshops
  • Enfance et Nature: digital design workshop
    Focus on the digital design workshops with the Ferdinand Buisson and Jean Jaurès schools, led by Jaime Jimenez, the first workshops in the 2025 Children and Nature: the changing face of life project.
  • Childhood and Nature: Mutation of Living Beings
    For its 2025 community project, ACTA is offering primary schools, leisure centers, and the media library an artistic and sensory journey centered on trees and the metamorphosis of living beings, in connection with the upcoming creation « De l’Hêtre à l’Être » by Laurent Dupont.
  • Art and Nature – the mutation of beings
    Focus on the 2024 annual community project, continuing 2023’s exploration of the tree