UNE PLANÈTE
Projet en cours d'écriture
Get away!
Lost at the far edge of the universe, on a planet abandoned by tourism, a group of workers attempt — in vain — to sustain the enthusiasm and magic of the early days.
UNE PLANÈTE is a storytelling performance that takes us long after the conquest of a distant planet. After colonising it with enthusiasm, the Earthlings gradually turned away, leaving behind a forgotten celestial body, now inhabited by only a few remaining residents. Here, the focus is not on the heroism of exploration, but on what comes after: the moment when excitement fades and gives way to disillusionment. The pioneers and investors have long since left, leaving behind only maintenance workers and employees tasked with sustaining a dream that is not their own.
Concept
Silvio Palomo
Set design
Justine Bougerol & Silvio Palomo
Lighting design
Léonard Cornevin
With
Léonard Cornevin, Aurélien Dubreuil-Lachaud, Manon Joannotéguy, Joana B. Polge, Nicole Stankiewicz, and Noémie Zurletti
Production
Le Comité des fêtes
Production and distribution support
Habemus Papam
Co-production
Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles and CENTQUATRE-Paris
With the support of
Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles – Research grant
ARTISTIC STATEMENT
Our Need for Escape!
Since the beginning of time, we have carried within us this irrepressible desire to escape our everyday lives, to leave — if only for a while — the spaces we inhabit, to expand our horizons. Escape is both an intimate and universal pursuit, a need as ordinary as it is essential. It begins in the smallest gestures of daily life: a walk in the forest, an evening spent immersed in a book, a gaze lost in the clouds. These moments of wandering are precious pauses, in which we suspend the machinery of the world in order to regain breath, distance, and elsewhere.
Yet escape, however gentle and necessary it may be, is never entirely innocent. While offering us paths of retreat, it also fuels larger ambitions: the desire to conquer new territories, to push back the frontiers of the unknown. This urge to transcend our limits has led to humanity’s greatest feats: crossing oceans, exploring continents, taking flight towards the stars. And yet, behind every conquest, questions remain: what do we leave behind? What do we destroy along the way?
In this quest, reality always eventually catches up with us. Every journey, every discovery, every conquest carries consequences within it. Lands once unknown become colonies, forests are cleared to build empires, unreachable stars are now imagined as potential territories for exploitation. In constantly seeking elsewhere, we end up damaging the very world we inhabit.
This need for escape is therefore deeply ambivalent. It carries a search for meaning and freedom, but also a risk: that of ignoring the consequences of our actions on what surrounds us. This tension raises a question: how can we explore and escape without destroying? How can we reimagine our desire for elsewhere so that it does not come at the expense of others — or of the places themselves?
With this new creation, I wish to explore these impulses toward elsewhere. By imagining an all-blue planet, deserted by tourism and maintained by a few individuals condemned to cohabitation, we invite audiences into an unknown territory in order to observe our ways of inhabiting space, prioritising values, shaping our joys, confronting our aggressions, and considering both our human and non-human counterparts. This performance continues the universe developed by Le Comité des fêtes over recent years: the creation of world-like performances that generate disorientation and wonder.
