François Chaignaud Archives

July 19th – 21st, 2025 ImPulsTanz, Vienna
August 23rd – 25th, 2025 Ruhrtriennale, Essen
September 9th, 2025 La Bâtie Festival de Genève, Annemasse
September 12th, 2025 Oriente Occidente Festival, Rovereto
September 17th – 18th, 2025 Biennale Danse Lyon, Lyon
October 1st – 3rd, 2025 Musica Festival, Strasbourg
October 5th, 2025 La Filature, Mulhouse
October 14h – 15th, 2025 Les 2 scènes, Besançon
November 28th – 30th, 2025 Théâtre de la Ville, Paris
December 6ht, 2025 Concertgebouw, Bruges
January 24th – 25th, 2026 Berliner Festspiele, Berlin

70 minutes

A Celebration of
Fluid Identities

As an international co-production, artists Nina Laisné and François Chaignaud and singer Nadia Larcher have developed Último helecho, a performance that is carried by music, singing and dance at once and where Baroque meets South American folklore and mythology.

Último helecho is the second cooperation between François Chaignaud and Nina Laisné following Romances inciertos, un autre Orlando, for which they invented a special, poetically artistic cosmos: Drag and dance, old Spanish songs and queer hero*ine narratives were interwoven into a celebration of fluid identities and forms of expression.

While François Chaignaud also sings on stage, Nadia Larcher, who is a celebrated singer in South America, will try out the folklore dances of her native lands together with him on stage for the first time. The multifaceted repertoire of traditional music and dances from Argentina – ranging from chacareras via the majestic zambas to the huaynos – will serve as the underpinnings of the performance. The duo will be accompanied live on stage by six musicians whose artistic roots lie partly in Baroque and partly in folklore.

Francois chaignaud

nina laisne

An Immersive Journey to the Medieval Louvre

With Petites joueuses, the dancer and choreographer François Chaignaud takes us on an immersive and continuous journey through the Louvre Médiéval : mutant and resonating creatures take over its fortifications, and form a disturbing carnival of forms, songs and unreasonable, mischievous or untamed figures.

Little player : this pejorative term, synonym of cowardice and a lack of ambition, has been appropriated by choreographer François Chaignaud in order to subvert its meanings, like a manifesto : to assert, through singularity, insolence and the lightness of bodies, a different way of occupying space, while blurring the semantic field of greatness attached to the consecrated place of Art. Little players performing continuously in the ‘Grand Louvre’, inventing their own rules, thwarting codes, introducing trouble, play, equivocation – deflating the authoritative effects of this huge exhibition machine. Taking the Louvre by the back, this community of performers reveals the archaeological layers of the medieval Louvre; one by one, each visitor discovers its foundations, its moats, its hidden strata, gaining access to a living organism, exhaling, rustling, populated by serious or comical figures. Like a prologue to the exhibition Figure du Fou, which explores the subversive value of the insane in medieval society, Petites joueuses acts as a counterpoint, a singing nave – a hullabaloo of voices, sounds and attitudes, affirming the centrality of the margin.

Text written by Gilles Amalvi for the 2024 edition of the Festival d’Automne

A Celebration of Fluid Identities

An Immersive Journey to the Medieval Louvre

A Celebration of
Fluid Identities