Baro d’evels Falaise at the Ruhrtriennale 2025

On the Edge of the Cliff

The premiere of Falaise on 11 September 2025 in the Kraftzentrale of Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord was not simply an evening of theatre. It was a return to poetry and attentiveness — for some, perhaps, even an initiation into another way of perceiving.

by Klaus Dilger

The monumental set — seven metres high, riven with cracks, openings, and shadows — became a living organism, capable at any moment of giving birth to something new. And indeed, from every fissure, from the most inconspicuous slit, bodies might suddenly tumble forth, performers hurl themselves into the void, as if the world itself were being created anew before our eyes. The audience held its breath. It was an evening of wonder, of continual surprise, of poetry and imagination reawakened.

Baro d’evel, the Franco-Catalan ensemble led by Camille Decourtye and Blaï Mateu Trias, has long devoted itself to traversing the borders between circus, dance, and theatre. Yet Falaise, created in 2019 as the second part of a diptych alongside LA, is more than a fusion of art forms. It is a poetic anthropology, an exploration of what it might mean to be human — and, at the same time, animal, body, voice, movement, memory.

From the very beginning, the set itself is a protagonist. What at first appears as a closed architectural ensemble gradually becomes porous, transforms, opens, disintegrates. By the end, all that remains is a ruin. And yet: through the white ornaments that one of the performers traces with light, almost calligraphic gestures, this ruin turns into a garden of poetry. The ending is not a collapse, but an opening into the unknown.

Premiere des Theaters Falaise mit der Kompanie Baro d’evel am 11.09.2025 in der Kraftzentrale, im Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord. Foto: RT2025/ Caroline Seidel

At the centre are not spectacle or acrobatics, but the fragile beauty of what remains unguarded. Humans and animals — a white horse, a flock of pigeons — share the stage as equals. Trust replaces discipline; unpredictability becomes the source of authenticity. Especially the animals lend Falaise another temporality: when the horse pauses, when the birds resist, an alertness arises that grips ensemble and audience alike.

Time and again, humour breaks through the gravity, maintaining a precarious balance between weight and lightness. An unexpected laugh, an absurd gesture — and a space opens in which vulnerability becomes visible, without becoming a burden.

Falaise unfolds like an exquisitely controlled tumble. Performers hurl themselves from the second floor, twine around the railings of the first, and plunge unscathed into the surging action. They dance beyond gravity, backs arched deep for minutes on end, as the vocabulary of flying low collides with the sound of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, who seem to rise live from the misty haze of a garage or stable door. A bridal bouquet finds its ultimate purpose as a fig leaf for the naked groom, stranded in the shards of conventions just shattered — conventions that only moments earlier clothed him in wedding attire. Pigeons and the white horse cut calmly across the turmoil, again and again. Arguments flare, laughter erupts, arias are sung, reconciliations staged.

Premiere des Theaters Falaise mit der Kompanie Baro d’evel am 11.09.2025 in der Kraftzentrale, im Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord. Foto: RT2025/ Caroline Seidel

Not everything resolves into a convincing whole; now and then, though rarely, one feels the weight of time — when hectic confusion takes the place of structured silence and subtlety, which might have served the moment better.

The evening culminates in an image of disarming simplicity: only the white horse and a single performer remain on stage. “Everything is destroyed,” she laments. Then she turns the question on herself: “But must not everything come to an end, so that something new can begin?” At that instant, the horse turns its head slowly, deliberately, towards the audience — as if passing the question on to us — while the curtain gently falls.

Falaise is not theatre that offers answers. It is an experience, a poetic image of our present: a world in freefall, yet one that continually begins anew. In the Kraftzentrale — this cathedral of industry that, for one evening, transformed into a house of poetry — Baro d’evel revealed how beauty can arise from fracture, and how the end may be nothing other than the beginning of another story.

The remarkable ensemble: Lucia Bocanegra, Noëmie Bouissou, Camille Decourtye, Blaï Mateu Trias, Oriol Pla, Julian Sicard, Marti Soler, Guillermo Weickert — alongside a horse and pigeons. Stage design: Lluc Castells.

Premiere des Theaters Falaise mit der Kompanie Baro d’evel am 11.09.2025 in der Kraftzentrale, im Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord. Foto: RT2025/ Caroline Seidel

PRODUKTION: Baro d’evel KOPRODUKTION: GREC 2019 festival de Barcelona, Teatre Lliure de Barcelone, Théâtre Garonne, scène européenne, Malraux scène nationale Chambéry Savoie, Théâtre de la Cité – CDN Toulouse Occitanie, Pronomade(s) en Haute-Garonne, CNAR, L’Archipel, scène nationale de Perpignan, MC93 – Maison de la Culture de Seine-Saint-Denis, CIRCa, Pôle National Cirque, Auch Gers Occitanie, Le Grand T, théâtre de Loire Atlantique, le Parvis, scène nationale Tarbes-Pyrénées, Les Halles de Schaerbeek – Bruxelles, L’Estive, scènenationale de Foix et de l’Ariège, le cirque Jules Verne, pôle national cirque, Amiens, la scène nationale d’Albidans le cadre du soutien du FONDOC, Bonlieu, scène nationale d’Annecy, La Comunidad de Madrid (Teatrosdel Canal), le domaine d’O (Montpellier 3M), Houdremont, scène conventionnée de la Courneuve, 2 PôlesCirque en Normandie / La Brèche à Cherbourg – Cirque-Théâtre d’Elbeuf. Projektunterstützung von PYRENART cross-border cooperation project, im Interreg V-A Spain-France-Andorra Programm POCTEFA 2014-2020 – European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) Mit Hilfe von CIRCa, PNC, Auch, Gers, Occitania, Théâtre de la Cité – CDN Toulouse Occitania, La Brèche, pôle national cirque en Cherburgo, Les Pronomade(s) en Alto Garona CNAR, Le Théâtre de Lorient y L’animala l’esquena en Celrà

Premiere des Theaters Falaise mit der Kompanie Baro d’evel am 11.09.2025 in der Kraftzentrale, im Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord. Foto: RT2025/ Caroline Seidel