N.Y. Premiere of Camille Boitel's L'IMMEDIAT Set for NYU Skirball

NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts will present the New York premiere of French artist, dancer, actor, and acrobat Camille Boitel's critically acclaimed spectacle L'immédiat, an absurd chaos at the crossroads of theater, circus and physical performance, from March 9 - 13, 2016 at NYU Skirball. There will be post-performance discussions with the artists on March 10 and 11. L'immédiat is presented as part of the Inaugural Tilt Kids Festival, a cultural festival for families.

On a stage crammed with machinery, objects, junk and bric-a-brac of every kind, L'immédiat is a tumultuous visual commentary on the uncertainty and mayhem of modern times. In sixty minutes of circus-theater mayhem, seven acrobat-adventurers defy a tsunami of unstable forces with optimism, dark humor and breathtaking physical skills. L'immédiat is appropriate for adults and children ages 8 and up.

Boitel presents a dazzling range of physical invention. The props and sets are crucial to the action: piles of junk, worn wooden furniture, clusters of lights, all arranged with precarious precision. Within these sets the performers twist and turn, lurch and tumble, in a series of movements that look like pratfalls but show the grace and aplomb that only the best physical performers can achieve.

The result is something like dance, something like pantomime-but ultimately the effect is ineffable. The performers move in time with the collapse and transformation of the sets; it's a world of entropy, with familiar objects taking on a whimsical life of their own. Physical comedy has rarely seemed so expressive- visual anarchy of the Marx Brothers delivered with a French accent. Bridging low comedy and high art, Boitel has created a truly eccentric work.