PERFORMANCES

SAT, NOV 14, 7PM

SUN, NOV 15, 7PM

DURATION: 70 MINUTES

FREE, RSVP ENCOURAGED

A tour de force of rhythm, sound, and movement, Mirlitons is a visceral performance by François Chaignaud and Aymeric Hainaux. As two voices and two bodies meet in this space, converging on a central stage, their collaboration melds beatboxing, song, and dance. Performed across Europe in wide-ranging venues, Mirlitons now arrives in Chicago. At the Renaissance Society, where it appears as part of the Intermissions series, Chaignaud and Hainaux’s performance surges to life with a vivid intensity in this reverberant room.

In Chaignaud’s words: “The scene is an arena. Two masked bodies, martial, unrecognizable, humble, and rattling. Microphones, loudspeakers, risers, bells, shoes. A ritual of presentations, a confrontation, a knot, a denouement. A total saturation of frequencies and muscles: a therapy through excess. Bodies and sounds torn between the melancholy of vanished rituals and the aggressiveness of actuality. Lips and heels in search of a forgotten code. A gracious and enduring duel of beatbox and percussions: a wall, a halo, an ancient world lost in the face of toxic perspiration, buried in the two fighters.”

Curated by Karsten Lund with Michael Harrison.

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Launched in 2017, Intermissions is an ongoing programming series devoted to performance and other inventive time-based works, staged in the Renaissance Society’s empty gallery between exhibitions. This recurring platform features two artists every year, supporting a wide variety of live projects.