Jaune pour jour(s)

FEDORA
VAN CLEEF & ARPELS
Dance Prize 2027
Shortlist

Jaune pour jour(s)

Belgium
Lara Barsacq

Jaune pour jour(s) © Lara Barsacq i

JAUNE pour Jour(s) is a choreographic work for nine performers exploring the experience of entering the colour yellow. Through images, histories, songs, materials and movement, they create a choreography infused with yellow’s energy, celebrating colour as a vibrant, living substance.

Presentation

What does it mean to inhabit a colour? Yellow is approached as a sensory, historical and symbolic field whose meanings shift across time and cultures. Inspired by the work of historian Michel Pastoureau, the piece embraces its ambivalence: the colour of the sun, gold and divine light, but also of betrayal, exclusion and marginality.
The choreography draws on two iconic female figures: Jeanne d'Arc and Peau d'Âne. Joan embodies sacred light and political legitimacy while challenging established gender norms through her armour and masculine attire. Peau d'Âne, wearing the radiant dress the colour of the sun before hiding beneath a donkey skin to escape patriarchal violence, transforms luminous identity into disguise. Both figures reveal yellow as the colour of paradoxical light—at once glorious and vulnerable, visible and concealed.
The performers build a shared physical language from these histories alongside their own personal associations with yellow. Gestures, songs, costumes, voices and collective compositions generate a choreography where colour becomes movement rather than representation.
Music forms an essential part of the work. Songs evoke the letter J, Joan of Arc, days, sacrifice and light, while monochromatic yellow costumes create an evolving chromatic landscape. Bodies oscillate between celebration and mourning, radiance and disappearance.
JAUNE pour Jour(s) proposes colour as a choreographic force capable of connecting history, mythology and lived experience. Rather than illustrating yellow, the performance invites audiences to enter it, experiencing colour as an embodied, collective and transformative space. Jaune pour jour(s) will be performed in a group around a luminous gestural language of dazzled eyes and bodies. Dressed in monochrome tones, they will embody both life and death, giving body and voice to this shared memory.