The programme of this year’s edition is set to feature more than 50 experimental projects, where circus arts, performance arts, dance, design, fashion and sound will intermingle. It will present new creations, showcase performances in Europe for the first time, as well as revisit others especially for the event.

Alongside both renowned artists and young emerging talents, fledgling artists and performers have been invited to participate, as part of unique partnerships established with both French and international art colleges, circus schools and schools of fashion and design.

After a grand opening parade by Marga Weimans and her haute couture creations, DO DISTURB shines the spotlight on artists such as Gerard & Kelly with Reusable parts/Endless Love, a performance inspired by Tino Sehgal’s Kiss and staged in Europe for the first time and Mel O’Callaghan, recipient of the 2015 SAM Prize for Contemporary Art with amixed media installation and performance, previously featured at the Sydney Biennale. Ed Fornieles, whose work explores the formatted subjectivity of a generation bottle-fed with web 2.0 will also be exhibiting, as will Ollie Palmer who is currently in residence at the Pavillon Neuflize OBC, Palais de Tokyo’s artist-in-residence programme. The Festival will be concluded by a formidable series of dances created by choreographer Trajal Harrell, intertwining postmodern dance with the exuberance and theatrality of voguing.

The DO DISTURB Festival also brings together emerging creative talents from higher and further education institutions, by hosting the projects of young creators affiliated with the research departments of prestigious French and international art schools.

The international schools marking their presence at the festival include the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and the Eindhoven and Amsterdam Design Academies - whose collective projects transcend and explore the relationship between body and object - as well as Stockholm University of the Arts, which has established a collaboration specifically for the event , involving Rachel Armstrong (Newcastle University), Rolf Hughes (Stockholm University of the Arts) and Olle Sandberg (Cirkus Cirkör). Part of a broader exploration of terrestrial and extra-terrestrial principles of ascension, the project explores the capacity of living beings to move from one world to another via a non-linear ladder.

Among the projects presented by the French art schools are Tokyo Jump Cuts - an experimental shoot in real-time - from the Lyon’s ’École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts aimed at showcasing its Post-Performance Future programme directed by Marie de Brugerolle, and also a sound and visual art project led by David Zerbib and Thierry Mouillé from the École Supérieure d’Art de l’Agglomération d’Annecy.

"For this new edition, DO DISTURB makes "transgender" the leitmotif of its increasingly experimental creativity, nurtured by the research processes of visual arts but also circus arts, magic, dance and fashion. In this way, DO DISTURB is once again poised to rewrite the rule book and turn all existing codes on their head." 1 

1 Vittoria Matarrese