"Everyone who falls has wings." Ingeborg Bachmann

Behind the huckster's vestibule opens the nave with its tricolour runways, a sky of canvas, wires, acrobatics, flying costumes, ghostly images, and as satellites, the Parade of clowns, the bêtes savantes, a remnant of a menagerie, stacks, inside-outside, a string of shacks, huts and cubbyholes, fairground stalls, objects of chance, backstage areas, heroic collectors, all sorts of stages, Mondo nuovo, trestles, illusionist's trestles, like relics, traces of poets and tightrope walkers, madmen and madwomen of acrobatics and comedy.

The curtains are half-open, giving a glimpse of a motionless tableau; we see the wedding table of the sublime freaks, the lit dressing room and its mess, ointments, powders, ointments, stage paraphernalia, pinned-up photographs of the metamorphosis. Further on, the black and white, silent images of fairground cinema, trailers on a camp site, with the words of poets everywhere like promises, composite fairground graphics, all the tricks of the show, light effects, mirrors, and strange echoes of lost shows. It's a dream come true. In this fairytale and prosaic tale, the poor things of the fairground and the works of great artists combine with fantasy. From the Ballets Russes to Garouste, Claude Cahun, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Pierrick Sorin, Barceló, Agnès Varda, Lautrec, Chagall, Picasso, Gustave Doré, and young artists, among the moving traces of the little masters of the big top.

It's a celebration of the artist as Circus Performer, according to Starobinski, so dear to our hearts, welcomed among the clowns and poets and the shattered relics of lost spectacles.

General Curator: Vincent Giovannoni, Lead Curator, head of the Performing Arts Department.
Set design and co-curator: Macha Makeïeff, director and visual artist.
Assistant Sylvie Jodard - Lighting Jean Bellorini - Sound design Sébastien Trouvé