Noémie Goudal / Maëlle Poésy - Anima

Feeling the slow pace of change; doing it through the history of our planet. The performance Anima, the outcome of the collaboration between the director, author and actress Maëlle Poésy and the artist Noémie Goudal, reflects upon our planet and the changes that are disrupting it. Inspired by Post-Atlantica, the installation by Noémie Goudal, Anima deals with paleo-climatology, the discipline that studies the climate of Antiquity, which for many years has been the focus of Goudal’s research and experimentation, as she seeks in her artistic practice to create illusionistic installations within natural landscapes. Anima – explains the French artist – “looks to the history of Sub-Saharan Africa and the desert that was once a swamp”. But the performance, which brings together the visual arts, photography, music, cinema and the performing arts, is not just an outcry against the climate crisis, but also a reflection about time. As Noémie Goudal writes: “The time of the human race is but a mere minute compared to the time of the planet. During our life on Earth, we are effectively incapable of perceiving its movements; our relationship with the planet is one of stability, symbolised by clear limits and predetermined boundaries. Anima is an attempt to change our point of view and perceive the world as it is intrinsically, by definition, in perpetual motion”. On the stage, Chloé Mogia spins suspended to scaffolding against the background of landscapes that are slowly morphing, in which a plurality of timeframes converge: “a past that nourishes the present which is itself part of the future”. The spectator is immersed in a naturalistic atmosphere, in which video, photography, music and physicality coexist in dilated, slow-motion time as a result of the continuous transformation of space. The performance is accompanied by the electronic sound of Chloé Thévenin.

Often invited to the Festival d’Avignon and abroad – from the Lincoln Center to the Festival TransAmériques – in 2021 Maëlle Poésy (Val-de-Marne, 1984) staged 7 minutes by Stefano Massini with the actors of the Comédie Française at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier. She is currently the director of the Théâtre Dijon Bourgogne.

The author of illusionistic installations centred on the landscape and documented in film and photography, Noémie Goudal, who was born in 1984 and studied at the Royal College of Art in London, and is now based in Paris, investigates the intersection between ecology and anthropology.

A dancer, performer, acrobat and circus artist, Chloé Moglia (Perpignan, 1978) founded the Le Rhizome company in 2009, with which she develops her research into aerial acrobatics, defying the laws of physics in a blend of strength and fragility.

Chloé Thévenin, known to the public as Chloé, is a composer, producer and electronic music DJ, who works in the fields of cinema and theatre.