THE HANGOVER REPORT – Cie Focus & Cie Chaliwaté’s DIMANCHE playfully realizes escalating climate change calamities with gleeful macabre

Cie Focus and Cie Chaliwaté present “Dimanche” at BAM Fisher (photo by Berger).

This past weekend at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAM Fisher Center, I attended Cie Focus and Cie Chaliwaté’s production of Dimanche. In a series of loosely interlocking vignettes – notably a number of scenes involving a trio of wildlife reporters attempting to capture the Earth’s dwindling wildlife – the multidisciplinary show chronicles a series of escalating climate change-related calamities (the wind! the rain!) that befall the natural world and human civilization.

Although the show’s premise is grim and some of the events that transpire in it are quite macabre, the work’s tone is surprisingly playful and often times gleefully humorous. Indeed, its blend of physical theater, film, and puppetry is an enchanting and poetic display of the possibilities of stagecraft. Although nary a word (at least in English) is spoken, the show’s expansive, hugely theatrical visual vocabulary more than compensates. Dimanche expertly proves the notion that pictures are indeed worth thousands of words.

As much as I marveled at the ingenuity of the staging – complete with a number of breathtaking shifts of perspective – I was most impressed with Dimanche‘s humanity and clear-eyed urgency. Also, the unique show may be one of the most inspired use of puppetry that I’ve encountered since Wakka Wakka’s sensational production of The Immortal Jellyfish Girl earlier this season. Although the BAM run is sold out, I encourage you to snag a ticket if one happens to become available.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

DIMANCHE
Off-Broadway, Physical Theater
Cie Focus & Cie Chaliwaté at BAM Fisher
1 hour, 10 minutes (without an intermission)
Through May 13

Categories: Off-Broadway, Theater

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