Crush Day

“Va Paver la mer” (“Go Pave the Sea”) is an Arabic expression meaning to assign someone an impossible task — like paving the sea itself.
The impossibility at stake here is not bringing about peace or resolving the “conflict,” but changing someone’s worldview, transforming a belief rooted since childhood.
Va Paver la Mer is a documentary theatre piece in which a Palestinian from Jaffa and an Israeli from Jerusalem, both living in exile in Paris, confront their own journeys of political disillusionment. On stage, they lend their bodies to recordings of their relatives’ voices — speaking about them, around them, without them. Throughout the performance, they attempt to build a house — a concrete gesture, a fragile hope that struggles to stand. Between these lip-synced portraits, this stubborn construction, and a karaoke of nationalist nursery rhymes, the piece explores what it means to accept a truth that destroys everything — and the price of such lucidity.
In the final chapter, like a mirror held up to the French audience, the voice of historian Nicolas Morzelle — performed by Louve Reiniche-Larroche — questions our own narratives, responsibilities, and the ties between France and the Middle East.
A work for those who have undergone an awakening and can no longer turn back.
At a time marked by heightened tensions, conflict, and confrontation, the piece seeks to place the human back at the heart of the conversation. It proposes another form of political manifesto — one rooted in intimacy, without softening the truth.
What does it cost to truly see, to truly change?
Through the testimonies of Michaël, Saud, and their loved ones emerges the human face of a subject that divides and inflames public debate. Their collected voices reveal the difficult task of freeing oneself from blindness, from the power of the narratives in which we are raised, and from what profound self-questioning demands. A painful liberation.
What personal parallels might we draw? Upon which lies do we build ourselves? At whose expense? And what does it cost to lift the veil of illusion?
The work invites us to question our own narratives and founding myths. How have they shaped our thinking? How can we recognize our racism, our prejudices, our sense of superiority? And what new perspectives might emerge if we freed ourselves from them?

In trying to create a performance about life, we realized that each of us had, at some point, wanted to die.
If we are here today, it is because we did not do it.
The last time we seriously and concretely considered suicide, we chose instead to remove from ourselves a piece of flesh and various bodily fluids so that they, rather than us, would experience death while we continued to experience life.
By making this choice, we opened up two possible universes: one in which we remained alive, and another in which we were dead. These fragments taken from ourselves are extracts from the parallel universe in which we died.
In this performance, where we have chosen to study life — and therefore the boundary between life and non-life — we conduct a series of concrete experiments in order to better understand these connections.

Phantasia is a solo performance in which we meet a character who presents himself as a mage and claims to have traveled 200 years into the future.
He returns from the future carrying a wealth of information — including the fact that, two centuries from now, people refer to us as “the complete idiots of the 2000s.”
They call us that because their understanding of our era resembles the kind of condescending assumptions we ourselves often make about the Middle Ages.
For instance, today we might look down on Descartes’ explanation of how the human body works — his idea that the brain produces “animal spirits,” fluid-like substances flowing through the nerves like tubes, linking soul and body together.
We find that explanation rather flimsy.
After all, we know perfectly well that the signals animating our nerves, muscles, and brain are electrical signals, not animal spirits.
People in the future also laugh at the fact that we believe the sun’s heat warms our skin, completely overlooking that heat itself cannot travel through the vacuum of space, and that it is photons of light that produce this sensation of warmth.
They also argue that our understanding of reality is highly fragmented, rigidly categorized, and deterministic. They think we act clever, but that deep down our level of understanding is closer to kindergarten — that we think about the world like a picture book matching one word to one object and one image: dog/dog, chicken/chicken. And that we struggle with entanglements, shifting scales, and fluidity.
So this mage returns from that future deeply affected by all the mockery he endured there — though not only by that.
It should be said that he is rather sensitive and cries very easily, which makes him both endearing and, at times, slightly irritating.
Throughout the performance, he demonstrates — while clearly being the most naïve among us — the limits of our ability to grasp the world’s complexity.

La Mentale is a hybrid stage project that explores notions of belonging, transmission, and solidarity within working-class neighborhoods in France. Through a performance language combining physical theatre, immersive video, and sound creation, the piece reveals the codes, values, and collective memory of a culture where resourcefulness, loyalty, and human connection are essential.
By deconstructing the stereotypes often associated with suburban and marginalized neighborhoods, La Mentale offers both a sensitive and powerful perspective on what it means to form a community today, on the invisible rituals that shape social relationships, and on the richness of a cultural identity in constant evolution.
The project draws from the personal experience of Soriba Dabo, an artist from the Bellevue district of Nantes, while expanding the reflection toward a broader, universal consideration of belonging and identity formation.