At PuSh Festival, Dimanche delves into the surreal way people live amid climate change
Belgium’s Chaliwaté and Focus Company joined forces to create the fantastical nonverbal production
Dimanche. Photo by Mihaela Bodlovic
PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and The Cultch present Dimanche at the Vancouver Playhouse from February 6 to 8 at 7:30 pm
WHEN VENICE, ITALY experienced horrendous flooding a few years ago, images from the historic town were all over the internet. One of them caught the eye of Sandrine Heyraud, co-artistic director of Belgium’s Chaliwaté, a physical-theatre ensemble. It showed people wading through the streets in waist-high water, Gucci and Louis Vuitton shopping bags held high above their shoulders.
“This picture really fascinated us,” Heyraud says, referring to her fellow artists Sicaire Durieux, also of Chaliwaté, and Julie Tenret of Focus Company, a Belgian group specializing in puppetry and video. “It was so crazy to see how absurd that was, people doing their shopping and really trying to continue on in this way. It was surreal.”
Around the same time there were huge floods in Belgium and wildfires raging in Australia. It got the three artists thinking about climate change and about how they could cover that topic in a joint theatre production. The result is Dimanche, which is being featured at this year’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival.
In Dimanche, a family gathers at the breakfast table on an otherwise routine Sunday. Their conversation is suddenly interrupted by howling winds and torrential rain. As cups and plates fly everywhere and the house shakes in the storm, the characters totally ignore the chaos surrounding them. At the same time, three wildlife reporters in the far north are doing their best to document Earth’s last living species.
The show depicts the inventiveness and stubbornness of human beings as they neglect the chaos of environmental disaster and go to ridiculous extremes to maintain a sense of normalcy. It raises the question of how much longer people can turn a blind eye to the environmental degradation happening all around them.
While it’s serious subject matter, Heyraud says the collaborators were sure to avoid taking a moralizing approach to the show.
“We’re not lecturing people,” Heyraud says. “We’re trying to bring a point of view on the situation with a lot of poetry and humour, using our different tools. Something we really tried to do in Dimanche is to walk the line between showing how terrible and urgent the situation is while at the same time highlighting humanity and some hope we can hang on to. It’s kind of a comedy and a tragedy. We think humour can bring another perspective. To be able to bring an emotional distance can be very powerful, and humour gives us another reading and understanding of the situation.”
The show is completely nonverbal. The artists draw instead upon physical theatre, object theatre, puppetry, low-fi special effects, pantomime, gestural theatre, circus, video, and dance.
“It’s only visual; it’s the sort of theatre that we do that we have a common taste for,” Heyraud explains. “We are about theatre of images without words. We use other forms of expression to tell the story. We tried to put some magic in it and a lot of surprises. The challenge with visual theatre without words is it has to be a very big rhythm to the show. All of our tools came together in a very organic way to serve the story.” 
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