From the stage, Liz Santoro recounts her life story through dance. Her childhood, ballet, New York, Paris, motherhood, the pieces she created with Pierre Godard. Except here, it’s impossible to untangle truth from fiction: some memories are real, others are generated by artificial intelligence. Some movements come from her body, others from an algorithm trained on her dancing.
This Is Unreal creates a hybrid world where the authentic and the synthetic contaminate each other. The music slides from romantic piano to algorithmic variations and pop music. It is an autobiographical pact gone awry — an autofiction for the age of deepfakes, a dizzying and unsettling game. Where does the body end? Where does the machine begin? And what if it’s precisely this indeterminacy that defines us today?
Concept, Direction, Text and Choreography · Pierre Godard and Liz Santoro
Music · Pierre-Yves Macé (with excerpts from Chopin, Mozart, Tchaikovsky...)
Lighting and Space Design · Mélanie Rattier
Costumes : Rezvan Farsijani
Performer · Liz Santoro
Generative AI · Léo Chédin
Intern : Anaïs Vallières
Production · Le principe d’incertitude. Partners · MODINA (Creative Europe program), CNDB Bucharest, Atelier de Paris / CDCN, Centre National de la Danse (Paris), La Ménagerie de Verre, ENS Paris-Saclay Research Stage, Collectif pour la Culture en Essonne, Université Paris-Saclay, University of the Arts London, Interactive Technologies Institute Lisbon. With the support of DRAC Île-de-France, Ville de Paris, Région Île-de-France.