The Other is the Sun
circular duet, 2027
by Floriane De Gracia with Zoë De Sousa and Matthieu Fuentes
They circle each other. Eye to eye, without respite. Their steps resound in unison, charge the space, disturb the silences. Bodies draw close, pull away, stop, strive to hold together. Time opens. The air is full.
The Other Is the Sun is a forty-minute performance in which, bound by their gaze, two presences find themselves entirely exposed to one another.
choreography by Floriane De Gracia
in collaboration with Zoë de Sousa
sound design by Matthieu Fuentes
thanks to
Lotus Eddé-Khouri (for dramaturgical advice)
Alexis Braun (for the gaze, whether filmed or not)
Liza Weinland (for the costumes)
Christophe Macé (for sensitive feedback)
duration 40 minutes
production ULU
with the support of
Théâtre Jean-François Voguet (Fontenay-sous-Bois, 94), Anis Gras (Arcueil, 94), Le Silo (Méréville, 91), Les Bords de Seine (Juvisy-sur-Orge, 91), Le Dansarium (Ste Geneviève-des-bois, 91), Lisière en Vercors
thanks also to the Hangar de Penguel (Finistère) and the Mallouestan (Calvados) for their welcoming.
This work is the result of research carried out in 2024–2025
about
At the origin, there is a need to get down to the bone of dance. To dance from a desert of images, to empty the mind of knee-jerk references. To work only from the raw truth of the inner movements that arise in encountering the other.
I adapted for the body an improvisation protocol inspired by the Meisner acting method, a technique built on observing the other and on repetition, which is only ever done in pairs, eye to eye. The rules of the choreographic game create a situation of extreme constraint: never take your eyes off each other, move only within each other's orbit, never break the connection that invisibly links the bodies.
Sustaining the movement protocol over time, and in silence, draws you into a kind of phase: you find yourself completely with the other. It is an experience that is rare in everyday life, and very intense. The relationship charges the space. Every variation becomes palpable and bends the thickness of the air. Maintaining this fine tension, adding nothing, only sustaining the transformations and circulations of states of presence: that is where the whole challenge of dance-and-sound writing lies.
The sound of our boots striking the floor has become the primary element we compose with. The pace is a little slower than expected, the walk steady. The rhythmic variations (stopping, starting again, speeding up, slowing down, stamping the floor, feinting) arise from the way the situation affects us, as a way of escaping the other, of finding some play, or of melting into duration, right inside the intensity of the relationship. The sound design, a whole range of blown air and oscillating frequencies running from false silence to saturation, supports this intensity or shifts how it is perceived.
Decisions are made in full view: no darkness, no turning our backs on the audience arranged all around, as close as possible to the faces, porous to the reactions provoked by emotional overload. The audience itself is part of the circle, confronted with the gazes opposite.
technical specifications
40 minutes
360˚ audience
capacity ~120 people
a quiet venue (where 'silence' can be maintained)
With a wooden floor (hangar, barn, ballroom, reception hall… or a theatre stage with lighting)
stage dimensions : min. 6 metres in diameter + audience area
quadraphonic sound (4 speakers + 2 subwoofers)
3 to 4 people on tour : 2 dance artists, 1 composer + 1 lighting designer if performing on stage
→ request the detailed technical specifications
team
Floriane De Gracia – choreographer and performer
Floriane De Gracia lives in Paris area and makes work through dance, film and writing. She thinks of her work as ongoing research, in which performances, films and publications are acts of sharing. Trained in classical and contemporary dance, she has been working as assistant choreographer for the duet Lotus Eddé Khouri & Christophe Macé since 2021. Her practice also draws on two research projects carried out at the universities of Paris 7 and Paris 8: the first on the intersections between popular dance and stage forms, the second on transposing danced movement to the screen. A filmmaker, she has co-directed several films in which dance questions the place of those who watch it. As a dancer and choreographer, she works closely with other artists on performances that lean toward the intimate, bringing into play the fluctuation of our modes of presence and attention, the place of the audience, and human vulnerability.
Zoë De Sousa – artistic collaborator and performer
Dancer and choreographer Zoë De Sousa creates song-dances animated by a visceral lyricism, at once raw and chiseled. Within the young company of the CNSMD de Paris, she works as a performer for Dominique Brun and Jérôme Bel, and takes over the solo IBM 1401 by Icelandic choreographer Erna Ómarsdóttir. After a research master's during which she was mentored by Myriam Gourfink and Pauline Le Boulba, she created Peaux – Troisième Hymne, a piece for seven performers, and became an associate artist at the Espace Pasolini in Valenciennes in 2021. Active today as both a performer (for Anne Collod and Mylène Benoît) and a choreographer, she created Le Soupir du Sable in 2024, a sung-and-danced duet with her father, Philippe De Sousa, a fado guitarist, in which she revisits a personal inheritance of traditional Portuguese song, the music that cradled her childhood.
Matthieu Fuentes – sound designer
A composer, sound technician and performer, Matthieu Fuentes makes musique concrète: he is interested in what recording and playback do to our bodies and our memory. Akin to a "cinema for the ear," his compositions and albums have a narrative dimension. Using different microphones, formats (computer, magnetic tape, cassettes) and other analog machines, he builds spaces that play on perception, between the familiar, the monstrous, domestic intimacy and outdoor environments. A graduate of the Haute École des Arts du Rhin, he approaches sound sculpturally. He collaborates with artists from a range of fields: theater, dance, performance, video art and film. The sound set-ups he invents often combine spatialized playback with "talking" objects (portable speakers, cassette players, doorbells, synthesizers…), like so many characters he puts on stage.
Best listened to with headphones (the low frequencies are inaudible on a computer)
Image credits: Lucie Vidal (cover), Alexis Braun (photos 2 and 3), Sylvain Arrivé (close-up)
Teaser filmed in Lisière-en-Vercors by Alexis Braun and Sylvain Arrivé
through spectators' eyes
It is a dance between two humans: dressed alike, with vaguely similar bodies and very different faces. The more solemn mouth has round eyes, and the softer mouth has laughing eyes. Their paths form a circle that is constantly distorted: oval, spiral, spokes. We form the fixed circle that holds them.
No physical contact; the thread between them is held by their gazes. The thread never breaks, or only for a fraction of a second. Their gestures oscillate between mimicry and flight. The air blows, the air slides between the two magnetized humans.
The rhythm of the dance takes us out of time: it is nothing but accelerations and slowdowns. We wonder: is this really the consensual, balanced game it appears to be? Are they talking to each other? Have they agreed among themselves to bewitch us? The sound of their steps draws us in, not like a military march, but more like a pulse. The floor creaks beneath their firm, unyielding tread.
The humans seem to be telling each other, in silence:
I'm here, always too far away to touch you, but always within sight.
I'm only adjusting the distance; I don't get annoyed when you move forward, speed up and slow down as I do.
By duplicating my gesture, you add your strength to it, and I like that.
Thanks to you my foot, my calf, my knee have gained in presence; each of them has become visible, part of a whole that has almost become autonomous.
Yet of your body I look only at your eyes; it's up to the audience to scrutinize these variations, because I feel them without seeing them. I could have made you dizzy from so much chasing, and yet neither of us wavers.
You give me the courage not to collapse, not to give in to gravity.
Who are you? A reflection, a mischievous ghost, a lost star?
I'll be your soul sister, your body sister, if you'll have me.
Then sound runs through them, breaking over them like a wave. And the duo holds firm. The bond that unites them is at once intimate and dispassionate. The embodiment is total: no shadow, no lie.
These sibling stars are about to leave their orbit.
One promises: I won't let you fall, whether I come to you or move away.
The other finishes: I won't let you fall until the world tips over.
Then suddenly the circle is only a memory.
Cécile Tarjot, audience member at a work-in-progress showing, May 2026
Tension of bodies
Tension of gazes
One toward the other, like two blades slicing through space
The Pool Around The Corner turns into a desert
The air grows taut and we imagine tumbleweeds behind the two performers
We are left breathless
Between them, the space closes in
Between us, the tension rises
Eye to eye,
At no point do they blink, do they waver.
Floriane De Gracia and Zoë De Sousa offer us a circular, undulating, hypnotic dance that carries us into another dimension, into their world where "The Other Is the Sun."
Maud Miroux, co-director of the Dansarium, spectator at a research-stage showing at The Pool Around The Corner in November 2024
Floriane De Gracia composed this duet with a radical protocol: locking eyes and circling each other. Throughout the piece, a thousand nuances will grow out of what could have been an exercise in style. To begin with, the whole space is occupied by the dancers, who take charge of the sound by striking the floor with their shoes. There is something like an assertion of presence, a raw way of occupying a territory.
In a second part, the musician takes over with washes of sound, like an echo of what the characters have been through. So there are two temporalities, that of the present and that of memory. The dancers hold each other's gaze continuously, and as they move closer to one another we pass from defiance to other kinds of relationship, like that of bodies in love when their faces are almost pressed together, smiling at each other. It becomes a question of intimacy, of longing, of desire, more than of a duel.
With an economy of means, Floriane De Gracia thus manages to immerse us in a complex relationship between two beings. She shows us what happens when we agree to look straight at the sun.
Didier Schwechlen, Culture Department, Essonne Departmental Council