Pernette Company

Artistic genre: Dance
Year the show was created: 2024 (indoor), 2025 (street)

Wakan* – Un Souffle is a dance-prayer project for six dancers, designed for performance venues or places imbued with spirituality.
It stems from a desire to create a spiritual space, driven primarily by the movement of dance. This quest involves the study of a range of sacred dances from around the world. It is not about borrowing, but rather seeking what endures across cultures and continents: the art of trembling, leaping, springing, or balancing; extreme flexibility; refined movements; extraordinary speed; the transparency of presence; and the evocation of diverse emotions, in the manner of Indian rasas, ranging from serenity to the world’s explosive anger. 

Nathalie and her dancers will also attempt—since touching the divine calls for excess—to uncover the element of daring, the extraordinary, and the extreme that lives within every dancer. Cymbals and gongs, haunting rhythms or frenzied beats, songs and initiatory languages… in harmony with the bodies, the music that accompanies them weaves its own prayer. 

Wakan – A Breath then conveys a ritual that may have the power, if not to quell the world’s anger, then at least to soothe us. 

*Sacred in the Lakota Teton language

The goals of the residency: This residency will provide an opportunity to finalize certain choreographic sections, undertake final research, and question the entire structure! For Caroline Nguyen, the lighting designer, it will be a chance to explore ways of highlighting the “great slaughter” to reveal its underlying structure, since the show will be reinvented at each venue.

CAST: Choreography: Nathalie Pernette / Performers: Pierre Boileau-Sanchez, Lucien Brabec, Lou Dormois, Jessie-Lou Lamy-Chappuis, Antony Michelet, Cloé Vaurillon / Music: Franck Gervais / Lighting Design: Caroline Nguyen / Costumes and Makeup: Fabienne Desflèches / Stage Management and Sound: Stéphane Magnin

Interview with Nathalie Pernette - Mag Cultu, by Chantal Prot, RCF in Burgundy, October 24, 2024