Furniture melts. Walls shake. A shark swims through a flooded home. In a series of vignettes that together run seventy-five minutes, Dimanche imagines the future horrors of the climate crisis using puppetry, mime, acrobatics, clowning, and video. The stories come together as three reporters try to document the events that assault panicked wild animals and a family bent on ignoring reality and going on as usual.
Oh, and it’s a comedy.
Sandrine Heyraud, who coauthored and codirected the piece with Julie Tenret and Sicaire Durieux, says when floods ravaged their Belgium communities in 2022, she and her collaborators were starting to have children. Their anxiety about the future escalated, and in the face of climate change denial, she says, “we knew we had to act urgently.” But they didn’t want to lecture the audience; they wanted to entertain and move it. “The challenge was to bring comedy into this tragedy. Humor creates distance that can be very profound.”
The three, who also appear in the show, bring two award-winning Belgian companies together: Focus, a puppet theater, and Chaliwaté, a mime theater. “We use different tools to speak the same theater language: very poetical and metaphorical with very little spoken word,” Heyraud says.
When Mary Roeder, University Musical Society associate director of programming, saw a vignette from the show in Edinburgh, she found it “poignant, meaningful, and also a lot of fun.” When she returned to see the final work, which she says “allows people to contemplate big ideas about the state of the earth in a way that doesn’t feel preachy,” she wanted to bring it here. Reviewers in New York, Australia, and Europe share her assessment.
The show may have fun to spare, but Dimanche serves a larger vision and aims to change minds. Heyraud hopes “the power of theater and art to create community will give audiences the motivation to act and make changes.”
Dimanche runs Jan. 7–11 at the Power Center.