Sugar Dance brings together nine performers of performing arts archetypes in a specific setting and offers a different venue, which puts the time of rehearsal and the time of performance into friction. From circus to opera, from dance to music, Sugar Dance lifts the veil on what unfolds behind the scenes a few hours before nine multi-talented performers take the stage, showing what usually remains hidden. Recognised as an exceptional dancer in 2019 by the Prix suisses de danse, Marie-Caroline Hominal focuses with her new piece on the notion of a troupe of artists. She chooses the pre-show as her setting – a time of waiting, concentration and rehearsal. An off-stage space with a heterogeneous landscape, where a kind of organised chaos reigns, drawing on popular, modern and classical culture, creating joyful, tender and tragicomic aesthetic clashes.

The Franco-Swiss choreographer Marie-Caroline Hominal trained as a dancer at the Schweizerische Ballettberufsschule in Zurich, then at the Rambert School of Ballet & Contemporary Dance in London, where she joined the National Youth Dance Company. Her artistic practice includes text, music, dance, performance and video and has led to numerous collaborations in Switzerland and abroad. The formats of her works are usually determined by circumstances or themes, but they all share the same universe, a baroque world in which identities become blurred, and the tragic and the comic merge. It can sometimes be darker, tending towards murky ceremonies, which are sometimes eccentric, sometimes more melancholic, revealing the disquiet and unease hiding behind the make-up and glitz.