The Shadow is showing until June 13, opening the ManiFeste festival of the Institute for Acoustic/Music Research and Coordination (Ircam).

This live and augmented show is an innovative and ambitious project, blending dance, live and electronic music, mixed reality, video, light, and sound immersion, enriched by the cutting-edge technologies developed by IRCAM. Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s iconic tale The Shadow, the show explores the story of a scholar who offers his shadow the possibility of coming to life and gaining autonomy. The shadow gradually frees itself and ends up relegating the human to darkness, creating a fascinating dialogue between control and freedom.

Choreographer Blanca Li and composer Édith Canat de Chizy designed this hybrid project to reflect our contemporary world, with its unsettling and fascinating innovations. The show invites the audience to live a unique immersive experience: facing the dancers and a percussionist, the audience, equipped with mixed reality headsets, wanders through a fantastical universe where the tangible and the virtual blur into one.

The Shadow questions the relationships between humans, their creations, and their doubles, while exploring the boundaries between the real and the virtual. The combination of dance, music, and immersive technologies creates a work that is at once poetic, unsettling, and deeply contemporary, offering the audience an unprecedented sensory and emotional experience.