What will remain secret
Auguste de Boursetty & Alex Freiheit
Tickets: 30 zł
“What will remain secret” is a performance on the border of dance, theatre and performance, an action between Auguste de Boursetty from France and Alex Freiheit from Poland. Their meeting came about thanks to an invitation Auguste received on the occasion of the 77th Avignon Theatre Festival in 2023. As part of the project ‘Vive le sujet! Tentatives’, he was to create a piece with an artistic person with whom he had never collaborated before. The result was the first collaboration between Auguste and Alex, which continues to this day and is still evolving. They both have different experiences, methods and practices that they wanted to use in their work together.
“What will remain secret” is a combination of choreography as detailed as lace and at the same time as dirty as the music Alex listens to. It’s a reunion around childhood memories, behind which cruelty may lurk, but Auguste and Alex’s strategy was to deal with it with their humour, their ability to organise play, their weirdness, their quirkiness and their random slaps in the face, mostly misplaced. It’s the memories that Auguste and Alex bring out to show how hard and innocent these kids struggled to know their identity. Their dancing together and the music they created with DJ Mona Felah is about welcoming their new names, which they both changed for different reasons. It’s about supporting each other in naming them.
Since childhood, Auguste dreamed of having a punk band, Alex realised this dream as co-founder of the band SIKSA. And thanks to the fact that, for this performer, making music means daring others to do so too, Alex encouraged Auguste to grab instruments, vocal cords, throats, words, scraps of memories, emotions together, from the spirit of punk. They come together on stage as dancers, musicians and friends. Their choreography together, based on Auguste’s bodily practice, invites those watching and listening into the world of the two’s secrets. Into the story of a friendship that we don’t know whether it has always existed or is just blossoming before our eyes.
Team
Choreography, dance, performance: Auguste de Boursetty, Alex Freiheit
Music: Auguste de Boursetty, Alex Freiheit, Mona Felah
Costumes: Martyna Konieczny/ no_przesada, Alex Freiheit, Auguste de Boursetty
Drama and choreography assistants: Mona Felah, Délia Krayenbühl, Collin Cabanis
Production: Oh la la – performing arts production
Bios
Auguste de Boursetty is an artist who works mainly in dance, performance and costume making. He is originally from Strasbourg (FR), where he started by studying visual arts at HEAR (Haute École des Arts du Rhin). He then moved to Lausanne (CH) to pursue a Contemporary Dance Bachelor’s degree at La Manufacture (Haute École des Arts de la Scène). Like his studies, Auguste’s artistic practice is stretched between visual and performing arts. He is interested in the aesthetic politics that play out between bodies, the space in which they are immersed and the materials with which they are clothed. As such, he attaches great importance to costumes, textures and colours, as well as to dance, which is central to his work. In addition, Auguste has a particular love for the medieval period and its iconography, which has deeply influenced his artistic work for several years. Through performance, and especially dance, he seeks to create real moments beyond the hegemony of reason and performance. Concrete spaces where the linear order of time is disrupted, where laughter comes from the gut, where we cry with every pore, where silliness is taken very seriously. All these concerns are present in his work, especially in “the foulles collective”, which he founded with three other artists: Collin Cabanis, Délia Krayenbhül and Fabio Zoppelli. They are based in Lausanne and have been creating together since 2018. Finally, part of Auguste’s practice also lies in collaborations as a performer, costume designer or artistic assistant with other artists such as Alix Eynaudi, Nicole Seiler, Catol Teixeira, Emma Saba, Vidal Bini, Régine Chopinot and Natasha Gerlach.
Alex Freiheit – Gniezno-born singer, performer, songwriter and poet known from the duo SIKSA. She has played over 500 concerts in Europe and Asia from small clubs and squats to the biggest European festivals (Unsound, Le Guess Who?, Festival d’Avignon, ESNS, Tallinn Music Week). She has a number of acclaimed albums and soundtracks to her credit and collaborations with artists such as Wacław Zimpel, Marcin Pietruszewski, Aleksandra Słyż. Author of plays and books of poetry. As a performer, she collaborates with contemporary dance artists including Natasha Gerlach, Auguste de Boursetty. Co-author (with Piotr Macha) of experimental feature films and music videos.
She often performs on stage with limited instrumentation and it is in the physical stage presence that she finds the strength to create her own path. She bases her work sometimes on childhood memories, at other times on fairy tales and legends, or reality transformed by an uninhibited and unrestrained gaze. In her work, the personal meets the political and the unspoken meets the shouted.
Winner of the Paszport Polityki award for 2020, participant in the Shape Platform 2021 programme. Twice nominated for the Fryderyk Award in the poetic music category for her SIKSA albums.
For many years, in her hometown of Gniezno, she and her friends have been running the summer open-air cultural centre Lighthouse on Wenea, where she organises concerts, workshops and author meetings for residents of all ages.
Co-financing
SACD, Festival d’Avignon
The activities of Komuna Warszawa Theatre are subsidised by the City of Warsaw as part of the project Komuna Warszawa – Social Institution of Culture.
