‘Dimanche’ blends puppetry and miming to spread climate change awareness
Award-winning Belgian theater companies Chaliwaté and Focus Companies held the opening visual performance “Dimanche” at the Power Center Wednesday evening. Hundreds of people gathered to view as hyper-realistic puppetry, video theater and miming blended to tell a story about humanity and climate change.
The show’s performers began traveling the world in November 2019 and have now performed over 500 shows. Through comedy and visual illusions, the show’s plot features three wildlife reporters documenting an apocalypse caused by climate change. Meanwhile, members of a family try to spend their Sunday together despite the catastrophic storm threatening to destroy their home.
The show intentionally features dialogue in Bulgarian so the audience does not understand what the actors are saying. In a Q&A session held after the show, performer Christine Heyraud, whose mother is from Bulgaria, said the audience does not need to understand the words to understand the meaning of the performance.
“It’s a language that not everyone can understand, but it’s not the goal that you can understand,” Heyraud said. “It’s surreal what we say, and the meaning makes sense with the scene.”
Throughout the show, videos were projected behind the performers to display tragic environmental incidents through the point of view of the wildlife reporter’s camera. Clips included a tornado blowing away the reporter’s camera and a tsunami washing away a reporter when diving for underwater footage.
The cast used a variety of special effects to depict these scenes. During the Q&A session, French-speaking performer Sicaire Durieux and Chaliwaté co-founder, aided by freelance translator Kelsey Trotta, said his favorite special effect was a scene where his character tried to grasp a staircase railing until a tornado blew him away.
“It’s really exciting to search for and find ways to achieve those special effects,” Durieux said. “Everything technical and magical. Unfortunately, that’s a trade secret.”
Durieux said “Dimanche” shifted its focus toward climate change as the show’s creators began worrying over a lack of action to prevent it.
“One thing that my co-creators and I were really struck by was the delay between impending catastrophes and everyday life,” Durieux said. “We are surprised to see how bad the direction of things are going. When we first created this performance, we didn’t necessarily do it to fight climate change. We are not people to moralize, but we would like to have faith in humanity.”
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, LSA freshman Manuella Sanchez, a “Dimanche” attendee, said the performance’s technical elements impressed her and introduced her to a new form of art.
“I thought it was spectacular,” Sanchez said. “I was smiling ear to ear the whole time. I’ve never seen a puppetry show in general, but the mix of puppetry and the special effects was so spectacular. There’s really no words for it.”
Art & Design freshman Sage Booth, who was also in the audience, told The Daily she marveled at the unique portrayal of a familiar issue.
“It was brilliant, it was clever, it was terrifying,” Booth said. “It’s rare to see a combination of something that’s so existential, yet something we’re so familiar with, and then to see it portrayed.”
Daily Staff Reporter Adrianne Totu-Frank can be reached at atfrank@umich.edu.