The 23rde edition of the festival “Le Mans fait son cirque” began on May 17, 2024, with a tour across the Sarthe region. Present in Le Mans from June 22 to 30, 2024, it offered 24 shows with more than 90 performances over a week, attracting more than 24,500 spectators. The event ended this Sunday, June 30, 2024 with the performance of the show Footprints“traces” or “footprints” in Spanish, proposed by the company Hold-up & co.
Exploring the past
The two acrobats, Olivier Mayrou and Matias Pilet, follow in the footsteps of Neanderthal man and imagine his encounter with modern man. Accompanied by percussion and singing, the rhythms and sounds help to reinforce the timelessness of the scene. They offer a show that is both poetic and acrobatic, between action scenes and moments of narration, which places relationships at the heart of human evolution.
Meet the other
It is therefore the Neanderthal man who opens this show. He then meets Homo Sapiens: both discover each other, scrutinize each other, and imitate each other. They then unite for an incredible, acrobatic and comical mosquito hunt. Homo Sapiens never ceases to amuse himself with his boorish and clumsy predecessor. Neanderthal man, for his part, discovered the tragic fragility and then the astonishing resilience of his successor. Eventually, Neanderthals disappeared, and Homo Sapiens ended up alone on the scene.
Leave your mark
With each movement of the acrobats on the clay square surrounded by spectators, it is the imprint, of the foot, the hand, the face or the entire body, which is imprinted in the ground. An ephemeral trace, destined to be covered by others. Leaving one’s imprint is also marking one’s territory, and the games of the two characters sometimes border on conquest, confrontation, war. Their meeting is above all a search for the other, when the man driven by curiosity follows the trail left by his fellow man.
Text and photos: Alex ALIX.
