Temps de Baleine

Explaining climate change to children: this is the challenge that French choreographer Jonas Chéreau has set himself with Temps de Baleine [Whale Time]. The starting point of this new production is Baleine [Whale], a burlesque staging of a very serious meteorological study in 2019. Working from this “weather dance”, as he calls it, Jonas Chéreau wished to create a form adapted to young audiences, explaining for them the major issues that global warming holds for their future. Based on a playful dialogue between words and dance, Temps de Baleine invites children to imagine their own interpretation, “like poetry that can be read in either direction”. Individual emotions resonate in natural phenomena; Jonas Chéreau, alone on stage, navigates between winds and storms to give them substance, using a gentle touch of absurdity. An appeal to the imagination that does not fail to answer one of the central questions of our time: what exactly is the problem with the climate?