“A portrait of the Peruvian Amazon driven by decolonial and ecological reflection—as well as fieldwork in the region—where the two circus artists let the forest take control of the staging.”
“Justine Berthillot and Mosi Espinoza offer a dizzying plunge into Peru’s painful history. Without didacticism, with poetry and humor. It’s never cheerful, but often very funny.”
“A truly operatic form—one that uses its grandeur to undermine the colonizing megalomania of conquerors of all kinds, toppling the old world while proposing new ways of doing and being—especially on stage.”
“Everything in this polymorphous object—where voice, body, sound, music, and sensation intertwine—resists. The tightrope stretched across the performance, both fertile ground and emergence, is a desire to render visible the struggles of those living in the Amazon forest. It’s the hybridity and uniqueness of the universe created by Justine Berthillot and Mosi Espinoza that captivates.”
“Mosi Espinoza creates, in tandem, a total performance—a ‘forest of presences’ within an Amazonian epic that interrogates systems of domination.”
“Seventeen shows to see in November.”
This Franco-Peruvian creation by Justine Berthillot and Mosi Espinoza invites us on a dreamlike journey through an impressionistic Amazon.
On stage, a forest of symbolic and everyday presences unfolds—inhabited by voices, stories, ghosts, and fantasies—driven by a central impulse: to re-anchor ourselves in the earth.
In this forest-opera, everything transforms, slips, entangles like a composite weaving—embracing collisions and ruptures—moving toward what must be defended in the face of human brutality, the eternal absurdity of devouring, destructive domination.
Within a grand and immersive scenography, the two author-performers offer a physical, acrobatic, absurd, and tragic adventure—its dramaturgy shaped by the political, ecological, and social struggles carried out in the Amazon with fierce love and determination.
To repaint over the ruins of W. Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, to gleefully inhabit its remains, to release again and again the manifestations of Aguirre, to persist in the stories—real, and perhaps not—that unfold and are told in the Amazon.
The grand, grim epic of history—and the other stories too: infinite, alive, those of trees and dolphins.
Created and performed by: Mosi Espinoza, Justine Berthillot
Sound design: Ludovic Enderlen, with assistance from Jérémie Quintin
Lighting design / Technical management: Aby Mathieu, with assistance from Elie Martin
Set design: James Brandily
Painting: Brus Rubio
Robotics: Jérémie Hazael-Massieux and Clément-Marie Mathieu
Artistic collaborators: Céline Fuhrer and Rolando Rocha
Costume design: Justine Berthillot and Mosi Espinoza, in collaboration with Marnie Langlois
Costume construction: Marnie Langlois and Chantal Bachelier
Stage management: Mado Cogné
Dramaturgical support: Marion Stoufflet
Mask making: Louise Digard
Set construction in partnership with: the workshops of the Maison de la Culture de Bourges
Delegated production: Espace des Arts – Scène Nationale, Chalon-sur-Saône. Executive production: Compagnie Morgane
With support from:
Ministère de la Culture – National creation support for circus arts
Artcena – Recipients of the “Writing for Circus” grant
Institut Français and ONDA – Office National de Diffusion Artistique
Set construction in partnership with the workshops of the Maison de la Culture de Bourges
