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Festival Échelle Humaine 2025




The artists in this 8th edition of Échelle Humaine turn their attention in turn to history, memory, and emotions, in order to bring forth new narratives and movements.

They explore our sensory and political relationships to the world, driven by the urgency of archiving its traces.

The festival also takes shape through encounters — discussions, a screening, and a practical workshop — allowing audiences to delve deeper into the gestures and stories being shared. This new edition of Échelle Humaine hopes to host both personal and collective inquiries, in an attentive rewriting of what binds us together.

Programming: Madeleine Planeix-Crocker
The Complete Works, Nina Beier
Sight
Created in 2009, The Complete Works is based on an invitation to retired professional dancers to perform a look back at the choreographies they danced throughout their careers.
The performance straddles the boundary between the mental space - where each dancer revives the memories of a former career - and its physical resonance, translated into movements that are carried by the body's memory.

The audience thus witnesses the unfolding of cerebral and muscular memories, which come up against gaps and physical incapacities, and is rewritten in action. The Complete Works makes visible that which we usually try to hide in dance: imperfection, fatigue, forgetfulness and the effects of time on the body.

The performance gives way to a new choreography, sculpted from memory. For the presentation at Lafayette Anticipations, Nina Beier has called on two Étoiles of the Paris Opera: Alice Renavand and Karl Paquette.
We Are (nothing) Everything, Makisig Akin & Anya Cloud
Sight
What can we do together that we cannot do alone? This experimental dance duet with a DJ is a queer reimagination of a creation story.
For the Parisian premiere, Makisig Akin and Anya Cloud will present a 30 minute adaptation of We Are (nothing) Everything. With patience, tenderness, and prayer Makisig and Anya epitomize the multiple ways that love can manifest. Intimacy facilitates straddling and queering notions of violence, care, pleasure, play, and gender.

Through performance the duo cultivates impossible conditions as an invitation to elusive spaces where desire, guilt, grief, and love intersect.

“We hold the complexity and paradox of being socialized female bodies who are queer and racialized. Sometimes we share a body and sometimes we splinter into the ether—we simultaneously elevate each other and take each other down. What becomes possible when love is stronger than fear? What does it mean to be intimately together in the wake and midst of multiple converging global crises? We embody the wildest dreams of our queer ancestors.” Makisig Akin and Anya Cloud
Federico, Alex Baczynski-Jenkins
Sight
Federico (2015) Alex Baczynski-Jenkins is a minimal choreography for touch between two performers.
The figures formed between the hands of the performers are at times recognisable as an intimate touch and at others as abstract figures of relationality and entanglement.

This is a choreography of desire on the smallest scale, that mobiles affect and sensuality as a means for a queer archive of touch.

Each iteration of the performance is choreographed in collaboration with the performers and tailored to the duo - with a special version created for the Échelle Humaine festival at Lafayette Anticipations, performed by dancers Malick Cissé and Andréa Givanovitch.
Saturday 20 September 2025 - 17:00
I Love Ancient Baby: a talk with Jala Wahid
Saturday 20 September 2025 - 17:00
Rencontre
During this gathering, artist Jala Wahid will present her recent film I Love Ancient Baby, in conversation with curator Madeleine Planeix-Crocker.
Together, they will unpack Jala Wahid's ongoing study pertaining to the cycles of time, the affective lives of artefacts, as well as her reflection on theatrical and performative forms of political subversion - an exploration which resonates strongly with several performances programmed in this year's festival edition.

The talk begins with the screening of the film. I Love Ancient Baby (2023) is part of the Collection Lafayette Anticipations - Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin.
Sunday 21 September 2025 - 11:30
Dance workshop with Karl Paquette
Sunday 21 September 2025 - 11:30
Atelier
During this dance workshop, Karl Paquette, principal dancer of the Paris Opera and professor at the Paris Opera Ballet School, will play with the codes of classical and contemporary movement practices.
Through lively exercises adapted to the group’s desires, participants will be able to unlearn physical habits in order to explore new bodily sensations. Karl Paquette's main aim is to share the joys of dance.

The workshop is open to all, with no prior dance experience required. We recommend wearing comfortable clothing and thick socks.

Karl Paquette is participating in Nina Beier's performance The Complete Works as part of the Échelle Humaine festival. He will be performing on Sunday 21 September at 7pm.
Sunday 21 September 2025 - 17:00
Such Feeling: an encounter with Alex Baczyński-Jenkins
Sunday 21 September 2025 - 17:00
Rencontre
Parisian premiere of Such Feeling, a feature film by Alex Baczyński-Jenkins, followed by an exchange with the artist.
Alex BaczyÅ„ski-Jenkins’s first feature-length film, Such Feeling, originated as a prologue to his choreographic exhibition of the same title at Kunsthalle Basel in 2019. The film was expanded and re-edited with each new exhibition presentation, as a processual cine-performance, eventually transforming and premiering as a feature film in 2024.

Such Feeling is a poetic and political documentary that follows a group of friends, Aaa, Billy, Dawid, Filipka, and Olo, in Warsaw who perform, protest and support each other amidst social transformation in a hostile state. This is a poetic account of everyday queer life, friendship, intimacy, and resistance in Poland in the years 2019–2024.

“The most important contemporary documentary on queer Warsaw. An honest portrait of a group of friends, which became a generational manifesto.” – WatchDocs Film Festival, 2024
La vertigineuse histoire d'Orthosia, J. Hadjithomas & K. Joreige
Sight
The filmmakers and artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige work between photography, installations, video and cinema to question the construction of imaginaries and the writing of forgotten stories. Through this performance, they draw us into a palimpsest of constant cycles of construction and destruction, uncovering possible narratives of the underground worlds.
This story unfolds in the north of Lebanon, at Nahr el Bared, in a refugee camp hastily set up to shelter Palestinian families fleeing the Nakba of 1948. Years later, in 2007, war broke out between the Lebanese army and an infiltrated Islamist group, leading to the destruction of part of the camp. It was at that moment that the first traces appeared of Orthosia, an ancient Roman city, which vanished after being overwhelmed by a tsunami in 551 and which, despite 15 centuries of vain attempts to find it, no-one could ever have imagined it there.

But how to deal with this major discovery, as excavations would mean a ‘second displacement’ for the refugee families? A dizzying performance, full of (dis)continuities, upheavals and regeneration, which plunges us into a past that feels particularly close to the present.

In partnership with le Festival d’Automne.
Lafayette Anticipations
9 rue du Plâtre
75004 Paris, France
+33 (0)1 42 82 89 98
contact@lafayetteanticipations.com
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