2024 TPAC Circus Festival: Galactik Ensemble—Zugzwang

★ Attention! Turbulence ahead! A wildly chaotic stage, absurd, astonishing, comical, and filled with poetic hauntings! 
★ The reality version is fully activated! A surreal theater experience alternating between 2D and 3D. 

“The unpredictable set design forces them to constantly adapt, a metaphor for the fragility of everyday life and the impulse of life, in which the comic reveals poetry and beauty.”——Magazine Poly

“Galactik Ensemble once again brings a wind of madness to an uncontrollable stage.”——Magazine Poly

“Five young men tirelessly try to escape from a ​“moving” setting that seeks to engulf them. The Galactik Ensemble thwarts all the traps set for them and plays with our fears with humor and mischief, to highlight the “discipline of situational acrobatics: the direct relationship between a rugged environment and man’s ability to adjust to it.”——International Festival of Films on Art

Zugzwang is like an absurd comedy where you keep stepping on Lego pieces that have fallen from a toy house, crying out in pain while trying to piece them together. The play opens with a cross-section of an apartment that looks like a movie set, everything seeming normal, like a family gathering waiting for friends to arrive. But soon, things start to get strange: new furniture begins to move slowly as if alive, posters float in mid-air, potted plants squirm suspiciously, wallpaper peels off on its own, and antlers slip off the wall—only to find that they are all oddly worn by the characters. The house then collapses in an instant, and the people try to clean up and restore order. But life has transformed: chairs buckle, tables collapse, floors become slippery, cups fly off, and walls rearrange themselves like a crazy Rubik's cube. Waves of surrealism crash over everything, bringing it all back to chaos, making you want to scream: "Will this ever end?"

The original title of the play, Zugzwang is a chess term describing a position where the player forced to move is at a disadvantage.  Galactik Ensemble takes the fragile foundations of everyday life and translates the abstract game of chess into an ever-changing theater space, injecting mischievous life into a chaotic apartment set. The tracks, ropes, mechanisms, and hidden doors are all deceitful, serving as both protagonists and narrators, creating a magical spectacle of complex transitions. Different possibilities collapse with one wall, only to emerge again with another, developing multiple divergent realities along the way. They cleverly use the "Pop-Up" concept to construct a multifaceted space with meta significance, where internal and external spaces intertwine. Common fixtures, props, and devices are given dynamic, elastic properties, creating a playful rhythm that transitions magically from 2D to 3D, showcasing the dramatic tension of this capricious and uncooperative space.

Zugzwang mirrors "our fragmented, divided, atomized world, simultaneously developing, interrupting, colliding, or resonating with each other through pauses, juxtapositions, fractures, and rebounds," as critic Sarah Franck points out: "In this practice of 'situational acrobatics,' temporality disappears, and a rapidly unfolding series of absurd scenes devours any attempt to grasp their meaning." Perhaps the focus of circus acrobatics is no longer on the awe-inspiring centrifugal leaps but instead gains a new definition from an optimistic attitude and adventurous spirit: a grand exercise in improvisation with a touch of salvation.
In the end, as a melancholic Japanese song softly plays, the audience will find that the playful antics of the five performers almost become a heroic demonstration. They skillfully weave a safety net with their bodies to catch the audience, telling us: To face the vast expanse of life is to confront endless accidents and unexpected mishaps. Sometimes, things go so wrong so suddenly that you feel like crying, but after reaching the depths of emotion, you might find yourself laughing in exasperation. Chaos isn't devoid of beauty; though the act of falling may be clumsy, the view from the ground offers a unique perspective, and within the dizzying, on-the-spot responses, there is a touch of poetic beauty.

Galactik Ensemble

"Our starting point is not just the circus itself, but a contemporary reflection on humanity and its relationship with a hostile environment." —Galactik Ensemble

Galactik Ensemble, established in 2015, is a performance group from France consisting of five founding members: Mathieu Bleton, Mosi Espinoza, Jonas Julliand, Karim Messaoudi, and Cyril Pernot.

The five members met and bonded at ENACR (National Circus Arts School of Rosny-sous-Bois), where they practiced together and discovered a shared vision. For them, the pure acts of speaking, standing, walking, moving freely, resisting, or adapting to external forces reveal the underlying powers that influence actions and serve as fundamental carriers of human existence. Their specialty is creating unbalanced environments that force individuals to adapt awkwardly to their own disarray and the fate imposed by the world.

Galactik Ensemble continues to develop "situational acrobatics" and first showcased this in their performance of Optraken, which features a collapsing snowy mountain stage: a hostile space where "gravity" has ulterior motives, and unpredictable dangers arise one after another. Circus performances are far from effortless; rather, repeatedly falling and getting back up is routine. To survive, they must be resourceful and adapt on the fly. This is a daring exploration intended to elevate the scene as the protagonist, showcasing the different ways the human body can extend its capabilities within fragile circumstances. In other words, "When there's no room to escape, we eventually find a way out!"

By incorporating cross-disciplinary creative concepts, such as chess terminology, skiing jargon, and fairy tale scenarios, and by rapidly switching scenes with preset mechanisms and foldable props, they create a rippling sense of immediacy that prompts the audience to reconsider the relationship between their actions and the complex environment. If anyone were to ask, "How can you fall without getting hurt?",they would sincerely and fearlessly respond, "Be prepared, embrace imperfection, and understand that getting hurt is a possibility."

Official website: https://www.galactikensemble.com/

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