Festival celebrates 30 years of avant-garde art

The Les Inaccoutumés festival, founded 30 years ago by Marie-Thérèse Allier at La Ménagerie de Verre, continues to deliver on its promises with its autumn 2026 edition. The festival is known for showcasing experimental and unconventional performances that challenge traditional boundaries in the arts.

Two contrasting performances highlight the festival

This year's festival includes two performances as different as they are radical, created by Maria Donata d’Urso and Helena de Laurens. Each artist explores distinct themes and forms, offering the audience a diverse and thought-provoking experience.

Maria Donata d’Urso reinterprets her 2005 solo

Maria Donata d’Urso reactivates her solo "Collection particulière," originally created in 2005 at the Rencontres chorégraphique de Seine-Saint-Denis. The performance, now reimagined nearly 20 years later, features her muscular body in a unique blend of visual arts and dance.

A striking visual and physical experience

Each muscle of the dancer is detached, capable of contracting independently, and her naked body evolves within and among two tables with thick plexiglass tops. The performance evokes the paintings of Francis Bacon, the resin figures of Berlinde De Bruyckere, and the vitrines of Damien Hirst, using perspective and deformation effects to fragment the body into parts.

Audience is drawn into a morbid fascination

Like an entomologist examining an insect under a magnifying glass, the audience scrutinizes each gesture, marked by the reflections of the plexiglass in which light tubes have been inserted. The exposed flesh, viewed like a piece of meat, is fascinating and necessarily morbid, reflecting a fascination with flayed bodies and their monstrous deformity.

Helena de Laurens explores themes of sleep and song

A week later, Helena de Laurens poses the question "To sing or to sleep, how to choose?" in "Le saut du lit," which she recreates at La Ménagerie de Verre. This performance is a reimagining of a piece she created at the Pop in 2019 as part of the festival (Re)Mix.

A dramatic and physical exploration of femininity

As in the performances of Marina Abramović or Carolina Bianchi, Helena de Laurens is stretched on the concrete floor of the Ménagerie de Verre garage, her long brown hair scattered under a white blanket. Her convulsing body, upside down, tries to sing the "Air de Didon" from Purcell's "Didon et Enée," which can be recognized between the gasps.

The blanket as a multifunctional symbol

With the melodramatic sense of great divas, but without their haughty superiority, she engages in a furious physical confrontation with the blanket, treating it as an unfaithful lover. The blanket serves as a multifunctional accessory, representing a baby's diaper, swollen breasts with milk, and a Sevillian skirt.

A portrayal of diverse femininities

Helena de Laurens's body, which has twice performed as an interpreter for Marion Sieffert, is not the controlled and muscular body of Maria Donata d’Urso, but her ultra-expressive face as an actress and performer overacts all femininities: the wounded queen, the smothering mother, the virile bohemian, the capricious child.

A dramatic conclusion to the performance

Her huge fingers, her toes, her long disarticulated arms form like appendages to her witch's body, topped by her Gorgon-like hair. Choosing the baroque, French this time, to say goodbye to this strange vocal performance, Helena de Laurens ends her solo in tears with the "Air du Sommeil" from Atys.