With “Derniers Feux”, Némo Flouret sets the Avignon Festival alight

What if the most beautiful shows were those that make us wonder: what did we see? Yes, what did we see on Saturday in the courtyard of the Lycée Saint-Joseph? What are these Derniers Feux lit by the choreographer Némo Flouret that made us feel completely contemporary. It's so rare in theater, in dance, to be contemporary with what's being performed; not late in the memory of déjà vu, not early in dramaturgies where everything is decided in the first minutes. Derniers Feux is first and foremost an open-air stage in the dark. We can make out clusters of megaphones, a garden scaffolding arranged in a slight diagonal, not facing the audience, already the sign that the evening will be biased with vanishing lines that will panic our gaze, foregrounds a few meters from us and, at the same time, backgrounds at the back of the room because it's playing, it's dancing everywhere.

We go back: night scene, in the courtyard a silhouette plays the trumpet with, in the turn of two notes, an echo of the glorious score of