CUT absorbs, in a condensed manner, several lines of work and research I have developed over the years with regards to choreography, exploration of urban space, video works and teaching drama students:

A radical spatial concept at the heart of the project, which generates its own rules and atmospheres.
The active experience of the audience, who move around, construct and deconstruct their own narrative, and share their experience. Here, the context is almost a textbook case: the choice isn’t theirs, the audience have to commit to and enter the play like they would a construction game.

CUT is not only a stage device. It represents the fracture that results from exile, whether we are talking about geographic displacement, the mental discrepancy between what we live and what we thought we could live, or the gap between two facets of our own personality. I wanted that fracture to have open meaning.

CUT, two zones of discomfort, like an impossibility to settle or relax, but fundamentally alive, and as unstable as life itself.

The narrative format of each side is very different: abstract, collective and choreographed on one side, it takes a more narrative aspect on the other, and relies on a central character.

On one side, there is an interrogation about paradise lost, expressed by the idea of community, probably because I am sensitive to the concept’s current state of fragility. I sought to breathe life into our bodily states, sensations and unravelling memories. I chose to refer to a reinvented form of folklore, and for the dancers to have the task of keeping this form of collective dancing alive and to try their best to fill a space with wonder, with such relentlessness that it might be ridiculous at times.

This attempt at preservation is still subject to the threat of an unstable world, the configuration of which changes constantly as we try to piece the fragments together. This is expressed in the other side of the tableau, which I devised as cluttered with boxes—a waiting room for an undetermined departure, continuously inhabited by a character, a figure of precariousness and solitude who constantly recomposes a mental landscape. The boxes become walls, chaos, a city, or clothes. The narrative is revealed in snatches and the main characters’ relationship with the others shows his disarray and the others’ struggle to avoid it.

CUT, Philippe Saire’ latest show, acts like a two-component glue. You have to see both sides to be transfixed. Indeed, as a visual arts enthusiast, the Lausanne-based choreographer has devised a unique spatial constraint.
Marie-Pierre Genecand, Le Temps

• One story, two distinct areas and atmospheres for CUT, an aptly-named creation as much for set design as for cinematic reference.*
  Agnès Izrine, La Terrasse

• Similar to how the brain works when it receives partial information and tries to verify or give meaning to fragmented elements. Similar to how memories are made as they blend real life with reported events.*
  Gérald Cordonier, 24 Heures