Marking the official opening of WIP Festival 2026, Lethe unfolds as a multisensory performance in the lobby of the CYENS Agora building, bringing together choreography, sound, digital artefacts and algorithmically generated bodies.

In Lethe, forgetting is not an absence but a viscous, almost swamp-like substance that slowly swallows what once existed: memories, movements, faces. At the centre of the work stands the River, no longer flowing but suspended in timeless stillness; a once-living body rendered invisible within a landscape of abandonment.

The performance explores the embodied identity of a river within the contemporary city, tracing its violent blockage and transformation through human intervention. River and place, two dynamic bodies rendered invisible, encounter one another through tension, pause and empathy. How can they coexist, remember and recover ancestral memories?

Within the performance space, physical and virtual bodies begin to overlap. A digital body, generated through algorithms, emerges as an imprint of memory and moves among the dancers, while sound, human movement and digital artefacts form an evolving, non-verbal choreography.

Positioned at the threshold between the physical and the virtual, Lethe considers what remains when a landscape loses its flow — and whether bodies, places and memories that have been interrupted can begin to move again.