This research is based on images of balloon sellers in different cities, that I have been collecting for years during my travels and tours. A distant part of my childhood probably motivated this attraction. I filmed several of them, idly waiting for customers or trying to control a mass of balloons carried away by the wind. The wind gives them an autonomy that is both light and disturbing. It is then the very body that becomes fragile and tormented by this swirling mass that seems much more powerful than it is.
All of a sudden, the balloons strangely materialised these existential aspects of flight, the need for lightness and elevation. They combined power and fragility in the inflated object; they imprisoned the air, the breath, symbols of life. They fascinated and repelled. As I like to say of a show that touched me: they exceeded expectation. And it is this richness that drove me to work with these objects.

Philippe Saire

The work is structured in three acts:

1. The disc on the floor, the dancers dancing in the periphery.
2. The disc on the ceiling, containing a bunch of helium-filled balloons inflated at various levels: floating high, at mid-level, and low to the ground.
3. Like a loop with the first one, the disc lowered back down to the ground.

Two versions depending on the size of the stage.
A circular structure in the centre, a disc/cover that contains the balloons and which at some point rises to the ceiling, along with the balloons, inflated with helium.
A bunch of balloons inflated at various levels: floating high, at mid-level, and low to the ground.
For big stages, the audience is seated in a circle on chairs on the stage. The audience is invited to the party.
For smaller stages, a more stripped-down, frontal version.