Lament is a performance on the edge of a concert and a folk ball, exploring the practice of sung lamentation.
Combining a gwerz (traditional Breton lament) with hardcore punk, it revives sound archives based on the same ritual logic: a transition between intimate pain and its public expression. These musical forms transform loss into collective energy through the emotional trance they generate. They also act as living counter-histories, carrying the memory of injustices and marginalized existences where the official narrative remains silent. What connection can be made between a gwerz and the distorted cry of hardcore punk, between a traditional ball and a pogo? The voice and the body are spaces of resistance and celebration, where pain becomes a force for life and a political act.

This show explores ways of working with regional traditions in a context in which they have been folklorized, reified and instrumentalized by populist politics. Faced with the rise of the far right, it is a question of reclaiming the everchanging forms of ancient practices like lamentation whose social function is fundamental.

This will be the third residency for this creation, they will experiment with a few new material but mainly focus on precising what we already have, and on starting the light design. They will be sharing the work at the end of the residency.

Tilhenn Klapper (FR/US)

Tilhenn Klapper is a French-American visual artist, choreographer and voice performer, graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Paris and Sciences Po Paris, and currently pursuing a practice based PhD at École Normale Supérieure and Beaux-Arts de Paris on ecological knowledge in the Breton macabre culture. She works with folkdance and voice, navigating between traditional, medieval and sacred music, field recordings, archives, and noise or punk sounds, to invent collective rituals. She also makes sculptures and films that share the same syncretic spirit, with a strong sensitivity to ecological issues. Tilhenn Klapper grew up in Brittany in a family of healers and is trained in traditional herbal medicine. Tilhenn Klapper was awarded the DanceWeb Grant (Austria) in 2021 and has presented her work in venues such as MUDAM (Luxembourg), Théâtre National de Chaillot (Paris), Kanal Centre Pompidou (Brussels), etc.