Similar to English visual artist Simon Starling’s work representing anxiety and brutal reality, author Éric Arlix’s Programme features dynamic, quickfire coaching speak that plunges us into a blind world where individuals lose all sense of identity. Using this management language, performance optimisation disorder and instructions, scenographer Joël Fesel catapults Georges Campagnac and Eliott Pinceau Orcier into an impressive verbal and physical balancing match, drawing on games machines, quotes and video game references.

Groupe Merci’s allegorical and performance piece presents this caustic observation of an absurd, deadly way of life. A system of doors, bridges and ladders form six miniature stages that serve as apparatus for a battle raging between word and body, humour and brutality, anguish and worry, conditioning and freedom, poetic escape and the world as we know it.

Ideology is played out before our eyes, raising the question of the potential of emancipatory systems within this virtual world of hyper-modernity and capitalist imprisonment. This is set to be a great and highly successful Programme.