An immersive and collective ritual inviting the audience into a space of transformation, community, and celebration.
In Let’s Go Back to the River, Martinican choreographer and performer Annabel Guérédrat creates an immersive performance where the boundaries between stage and audience gradually dissolve. The audience is invited into a shared journey through ritual actions and situations centred around observation, presence, and collective experience.
Inspired by Caribbean traditions, futurism, and contemporary performative practices, the work unfolds as a sensory and spiritual experience. Together with performer Chloé Timon and local volunteer participants, the audience is guided through different stages of the performance, including a cleansing ritual inspired by ben démaré. Gradually, the bodies on stage transform into hybrid and futuristic mother figures – a poetic encounter between ancestral histories and imagined futures.
Bodies, sound, images, and rituals merge into a living and relational landscape, shaped by the dramaturgy of Làzaro Benítez Díaz and the sound compositions of Renaud Bajeux. The performance moves towards a collective celebration with a DJ set, inviting the audience to participate and share a communal moment. Through her artistic practice, Guérédrat explores the political body of Black and racialised women in the Caribbean. Drawing on ecofeminism, spirituality, and activism, she creates artistic universes where the intimate, collective, and transformative coexist side by side.
● Annabel Guérédrat is a choreographer, dancer, and performance artist born in New Caledonia and based in Martinique, where she directs the company Artincidence. Her transdisciplinary artistic practice moves between performance, contemporary dance, and rituals. Through spirituality, ecofeminism, Afro-diasporic practices, and postcolonial perspectives, she explores the political body of the Black Caribbean woman. Guérédrat is a certified Body-Mind Centering® practitioner and works within educational, social, and correctional contexts. Her works—such as A freak show for S., I’M A BRUJA, MamiSargassa 3.0., and Let’s Go Back to the River—investigate the relationship between body, memory, territory, decolonial ecology, and collective rituals. Chloé Timon is a contemporary dancer from Martinique with a broad background in movement arts. She is a trained practitioner of classical Indian dance (Bharatanatyam) alongside ballet and contemporary dance. Her artistic practice is shaped by a deep interest in physical diversity, rhythm, and cross-cultural movement traditions.
In collaboration with CODA Oslo International Dance Festival .
