Festival Parallèle 15, Quelle Aurore

February 7 at 19:00
Friche la Belle de Mai, Salle Corvin

Performance
Duration: 35 min

In co-presentation with Friche la Belle de Mai

In this performance, Bonnie Banane and Soa Ratsifandrihana meet on stage for the first time. Two bodies, two presences, metamorphosing between fantasy and reality, carried by an affective machine where heart and body seek to make a wish. This wish is to stay standing in a world saturated with images, injunctions, and shocks—a world where the present seems trapped in an endless loop. Between dawn and horror, they explore what Samah Karaki calls psychic numbness: a form of emotional anesthesia in the face of a crisis-saturated world, where defense mechanisms take the form of memes, absurd satires, and digital and sensory excesses.

Caught in a spiral of doomscrolling—the compulsive reflex to endlessly scroll through content on our screens—and in the harmful effects of brain rot, they attempt to resist the pervasive cynicism by countering it with a pursuit of magic, innocence, and sincerity.
On treadmills at the front of the stage, symbols of waiting, wandering, and movement without destination, their bodies move forward to avoid sinking. The performance becomes a way of living in disturbance and fully inhabiting the flesh.

The aesthetic draws from the most dazzling pop culture: Fun Radio, Sailor Moon, bubblegum, hot, pop, and fun—layers of visual, musical, and choreographic elements that compose an unstable, mutating universe, where the varnish and apparent lightness mask deep tensions.

Biographies

Born in 1994, Soa Ratsifandrihana trained at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris. She has collaborated with artists such as James Thiérrée, Salia Sanou, and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. In 2021, her first solo, g r oo v e, explored groove, improvisation, and diasporic influences. In 2024, she created a diptych: a radio work, Rouge cratère, awarded at the Paris Podcast Festival, and the performance Fampitaha, fampita, fampitàna. Quelle Aurore, in duet with Bonnie Banane, is a commission from SACD France and the Festival d’Avignon. Her work investigates the authenticity of identities and diasporic spaces through a bodily language guided by groove, movement, and improvisation. Her choreography gives voice to multiple inheritances and temporalities, embracing hybridity and contradictions, joy and doubt, playfulness and seriousness. Focused on collective creation and relationality, her practice honors cultural persistence, presence, and transformation. Soa is an associate artist at Kaaitheater (2023–2025) and, starting in September 2026, will be an associate artist at Charleroi Danse. She founded the company Kintana in Brussels in 2025.

Bonnie Banane is a singer-songwriter and composer, born in Brittany in 1987. From her debut single Muscles in 2012 to her second album NINI (2024), and through numerous collaborations (Chassol, Chilly Gonzales, Sabrina Bellaouel, Flavien Berger, Hubert Lenoir…), Bonnie Banane moves through the French music scene with a singular grace all her own. She transcends genres, always seeking to blur the boundaries between them. Juggling R&B, chanson, and jazz, her melodies are always nourished by words, like incantations. With an almost alchemical brilliance, she reconciles the most opposing realities: cold death, burning passion, and all the timid in-betweens to which few songs are dedicated. Inspired by her surroundings, her own story, and those of others—between the surrealist poetry of Brigitte Fontaine and the gospel of D’Angelo—she cultivates the art of being enigmatic, sexy, and whimsical. Trained in dramatic arts, she can also be found acting in films by Bertrand Mandico and Bertrand Bonello. This theatricality accompanies her music and stage performances. On stage, between the exuberance of the clown and the dignity of the mourners, she teaches us to dance with doubt and laugh with darkness, composing the unexpected soundtrack of our lives.

Credits

Distribution

Performance, choreography, and writing: Bonnie Banane and Soa Ratsifandrihana
Dramaturgy: Sékou Séméga and Maria Dogahe
Sound design: Guilhem Angot
Lighting design and technical direction: Thomas Roulleau-Gallais
Costumes: Maria Dogahe
Sound operation: Guilhem Angot, Jean-Louis Waflart, and Paul Boulier (alternating)
Lighting operation: Julien Rauche
Alma Office Production: Anne-Lise Gobin, Camille Queval
MC93 Production: Elise Donné, Chloé Pataud
Research: Harilay Rabenjamina
Intern: Elsy Robert

Executive production

Compagnie Kintana, in collaboration with MC93 – maison de la culture de Seine-Saint-Denis à Bobigny

Coproduction

Festival d’Avignon ; SACD ; Kaaitheater ; Centre chorégraphique national d’Orléans ; Ballet National de Marseille ; CCN – Ballet de Lorraine

Support

Onda – Office national de diffusion artistique ; Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles Paris

Parallèle 15 is about forty artists, performances, visual art exhibitions, screenings, readings, meetings, and partys.

Bonnie Banane & Soa Ratsifandrihana
Quelle Aurore

2025