Fog rises before anything else. It bubbles from the ground, drifts in slow sheets across the stage, and hangs in midair like breath. In Gisèle Vienne’s Extra Life at the Holland Festival, the fog asserts itself as presence, reflecting the characters’ emotion and struggle. It moves through the performance as a living participant. It coils around the performers, obscures them, and releases them again. Through this shifting density, the audience enters a world of unsettled time, where trauma and tenderness appear to move at different speeds.
Vienne has developed a distinctive language of slow motion, disjunction, and suspended intensity. Working between choreography, theatre, and visual art, she constructs temporal architectures where gesture and light become psychological material. At the Holland Festival, Extra Life extends this vocabulary into new terrain. The piece turns toward the fragile persistence of bodies that remain after violation.
The fog asserts itself as presence, reflecting the characters’ emotion and struggle.
The performance begins in darkness. A group of teenagers gathers in a forest clearing on their way home from a choir competition. Gradually, we understand that something terrible has happened to them. The work unfolds in the aftermath, in the silence following language, where survival is physical rather than narrative.
The stage resembles a nocturnal landscape, at once natural and artificial. Layers of fog and smoke move through it, sometimes as a low ground mist, sometimes as thick vertical sheets. At certain points, the vapor swells in opaque clouds that engulf the dancers. Lasers slice through the air, tracing geometric lines that pass close to the bodies or enclose them within a shifting grid. These elements shape the action itself, defining its space of existence.
The performers move through a double structure of time. Their voices speak at normal speed, while their bodies move with extreme slowness. The visual and vocal tracks are never aligned. This separation creates a kind of temporal vertigo. Speech belongs to the present, while movement carries the weight of the past. Occasionally, a dancer slips or jerks, breaking the precision of the slowed rhythm. These small ruptures feel like tremors, the body remembering what it cannot articulate.
The performers move through a double structure of time. Speech belongs to the present, while movement carries the weight of the past.
The fog becomes an extension of the body’s emotional field. It hides and reveals, expands and contracts, as if responding to what the performers cannot say. Within it, they find temporary shelter, a camouflage that allows them to approach the unspeakable. Vienne treats the fog as a material of empathy. Through its density, the characters find each other and, for moments, themselves.
The choreography remains precise yet unresolvable. Figures advance and recede in near silence. Their proximity suggests recognition and estrangement at once. The forest becomes a site of shared memory and isolation. Caterina Barbieri’s score and Adrien Michel’s sound design vibrates beneath the action, a low sustained presence that thickens the air. The sound sustains emotion rather than directing it, holding the stage in a continuous state of trembling.
The performers’ work is extraordinary. They embody Vienne’s exacting physical language with precision and stamina, sustaining the extreme slowness while carrying the emotional weight of their characters. Every gesture, shift of focus, or intake of breath feels deliberate and charged. Their control is matched by vulnerability. The discipline required to maintain tempo and form over the span of the performance reveals a kind of endurance that is both physical and emotional. It is a feat of strength and feeling, a rigorous translation of trauma into movement that remains fully alive.
It is a feat of strength and feeling, a rigorous translation of trauma into movement that remains fully alive.
Vienne’s work has always interrogated the act of looking. In Extra Life, she transforms spectatorship into a condition of uncertainty. The fog reduces visibility, the slowness amplifies detail, and the lasers enforce distance. The audience watches yet never fully perceives. The experience mirrors the social blindness surrounding trauma, a collective inability to see what is already present.
There are moments when the performers approach one another and the illusion shifts. A hand touches a shoulder, a head turns toward a faint light, a breath becomes audible. These gestures are small but charged with the energy of endurance. They mark the return of life inside a landscape suspended between memory and disappearance.
Vienne has long used the languages of cinema, installation, and sculpture to expand the frame of dance. Here she pares them down. The scenography is elemental: air, light, sound, time. What remains is the act of persistence itself, the slow rebuilding of relation in the wake of harm.
When the fog finally begins to lift, the figures stand in the clearing. The light is thin. Resolution never arrives, only a shift in awareness. The work closes in a quiet recognition that survival continues as choreography, a repetition without conclusion.
concept Gisèle Vienne choreography Gisèle Vienne direction Gisèle Vienne scenography Gisèle Vienne in close collaboration with Adèle Haenel, Theo Livesey, Katia Petrowick performance Adèle Haenel, Theo Livesey, Katia Petrowick music Caterina Barbieri sound design Adrien Michel light design Yves Godin, Gisèle Vienne text Adèle Haenel, Theo Livesey, Katia Petrowick, Gisèle Vienne assistant Sophie Demeyer costumes Gisèle Vienne, Camille Queval, FrenchKissLA creation dolls Etienne Bideau-Rey, Nicolas Herlin technical coordination Samuel Dosière stage management Antoine Hordé sound manager Adrien Michel, Géraldine Foucault Voglimacci light manager Samuel Dosière, Iannis Japiot with thanks to Elsa Dorlin, Etienne Hunsinger, Sandra Lucbert, Romane Rivol, Anja Röttgerkamp, Sabrina Lonis, Maya Masse, Giovanna Rua, Lina Hinsky, Erik Houllier, Andrea Kerr tour Alma Office (Anne-Lise Gobin & Camille Queval) production Alma Office (Anne-Lise Gobin & Camille Queval) administration Cloé Haas, Clémentine Papandrea
Photo: Estelle Hanania
