Sylphides

Vacuum sealed into black latex bags drawn from the world of BDSM - the sylphs’ bodies evoke stone pebbles, cocoons of dark matter or mortuary bags. These creatures of the air, present in 18th-century literature and embodied in the famous 19th-century ballet, symbolize grace and lightness, but also a corporeal envelope freed from mortal flesh.

Building on this mythological terrain, the duo create a performance that disrupts the perception of the body: silhouettes protected by a latex membrane are transformed through a visual ceremony of inhalation and exhalation. The piece unfolds a perceptual enigma, sliding from ancient statuary to Body Art, exploring the boundary between surface and interiority, life and disappearance.

A Portrait that breathes new life into Sylphides, the legendary piece created in 2009 by Cecilia Bengolea and François Chaignaud. For this extended version at the Grand Palais, multiple figures will bring this tale of death and rebirth to life.

Design : Cecilia Bengolea, François Chaignaud

Performance co-produced by the GrandPalaisRmn and the Festival d'Automne in Paris

A first partnership between the Grand Palais and the Festival d'Automne took place in 2021, before the monument's renovation work began, with the creation of Boris Charmatz's La Ronde. This new collaboration in 2025 marks the reopening of the Grand Palais with the co-production of two projects by choreographer François Chaignaud, featured in a Portrait in this edition of the Festival. Sylphides and La Revue des Tumerels will take over two emblematic and singular galleries of the Grand Palais.

On the two levels of Galerie 2, redesigned by architect Pierre Vivien in the early 1960s, Sylphides, the legendary performance created in 2009 with Cécilia Bengolea, unfolds in a new, extended, ambulatory version.

The majestic Galerie 7 will host the world premiere of Revue des Tumerels, a cabarete form imagined with choral conductor Geoffroy Jourdain and a community of performers blending dance and song, the fruit of the two artists' joint work.