Intermissions: François Chaignaud & Aymeric Hainaux

A tour de force of rhythm, sound, and movement, Mirlitons is a visceral performance by choreographer François Chaignaud and musician 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 to date across Europe in wide-ranging venues, from Brussels to Paris to Vienna, 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 under the high vaulted ceiling.

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.

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

Mirlitons is supported by FUSED, a program of Villa Albertine and Albertine Foundation.