Thibault Lac, «Blue Moon»

As part of the exhibition «Suzanne Perrottet. After Dada, After Dance», Thibault Lac presents the new performance «Blue Moon» on March 26. The work draws on the life and practice of dancer and pedagogue Suzanne Perrottet and her encounters with the avant-garde circles of Dada in Zurich. It turns in particular to the nocturnal world of early twentieth-century cabarets—spaces where artistic experimentation unfolded and where popular entertainment, Kleinkunst, the milieu, and the avant-garde intersected.

In «Blue Moon», Lac revisits several of Perrottet’s involvements in the Dada circle and cabaret programmes such as Der Krater, where she performed the number «Die Bar» through mime and dance. Rather than reconstructing this figure, the performance treats it as a guiding presence to be traversed, so that the figure itself becomes the archive, activating gestures and traces from the past. Structured around the temporality of a rehearsal, the piece also echoes Perrottet’s first encounter with Dada. When she attended a preparatory gathering for the Dada soirée of July 1916 at the Zunfthaus zur Waag, she witnessed—and was the first to describe—a performance by Emmy Hennings in which the artist’s freedom of movement was constrained by a cardboard costume. «Blue Moon» places the audience in a similar position: as spectators who observe gestures and mechanisms as if in rehearsal, the stage unfolding as a space where what has not yet happened meets what history barely recorded.

Thibault Lac is an artist, dancer, and choreographer based in Geneva. Focused on embodied expertise and performer-driven practices, he has collaborated with artists such as Price, Noé Soulier, Ligia Lewis, Mathilde Monnier, and Alexandra Bachzetsis, among others. For over a decade, he has been a recurring presence in the work of American choreographer Trajal Harrell. He has developed interdisciplinary choreographic projects, notably with Swiss composer Tobias Koch in Such Sweet Thunder (Young Choreographers Award, ImPulsTanz 2019), followed by Fool’s Gold (2021). Recent works include Knight-Night (2022, with Bryana Fritz) and the solo Blue Roses (2024), an exploration of camp, melancholy, and the grotesque. Interested in hybridization, in both content and procedures, as much as in genres and formats, he has created burlesque numbers for the parisian cabaret Les Moches.

Photo: Florian Hetz.