In early 2012, even before we started to get excited about video mapping, French cultural festival La Fete introduced us to Adrien M and Claire B’s “Cinematique”. The performance saw the audience at Sodsai Pantoomkomol Centre for Dramatic Arts totally mesmerised by cascading letters, luminous meteor showers, Escher-like dreamscapes, and floors disintegrating into three dimensions.

With La Fete now a year-round event, the French Embassy, with support from Institut Francaise and Hotel Pullman Bangkok King Power and in collaboration with Studio 41 and World Performances@Drama Chula, have announced that the company, which describes itself as “mobile, organic, ephemeral, random, sensory: searching for a live digital world” will kick off its Asia tour of “Hakanai” at the same venue.

Active in both digital arts and performing arts since 2004, the Lyon-based company, led by juggler, artist and computer scientist Adrien Mondot and graphic designer Claire Bardainne, combines the real and virtual worlds with IT tools that are developed and customised specifically for each installation or performance. Placing the human body at the heart, their work speaks a visual language that’s based on playing and enjoyment and which is designed to stir the audience’s imagination.

Taking the archaic Japanese word used more often by poets “Hakanai” – and the solo dancer on this Asia tour is also Japanese, namely Akiko Kajihara – they say that it denotes the state of “temporary and fragile, evanescent and transient, and in this case something set between dreams and reality”.

Mondot and Bardainne describe this work as “a Haiku dance performance taking place in a cube of moving images projected live by a digital performer.”

Describing the performance at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) last year, Dance Informa magazine’s Stephanie Woodard wrote, “An audience member seated in the round in BAM’s Fishman Space watched as Kajihara, in a simple white long-sleeved shirt and trousers, explored ‘Hakanai’s’ ephemeral world. The set was an ever-mutating array of white lines, grids, letters, and numbers projected on tulle stretched over the walls of a cubical frame”.

“Kajihara entered the cube via an opening on one side and began to move. She turned, rolled, and swept her arms along the transparent walls. An overhead sensor picked up her gestures and caused the digital forms to respond. They rose, fell, gathered, and dispersed on the tulle scrim and flickered across the faces of surrounding audience members, making them part of the spectacle. Simultaneously, Bardainne used a tablet computer to react to the dance and manipulate the projections in additional ways, a process she calls ‘digital puppetry’.”

Mondot and Bardainne add, “Through the encounter of gesture and image, two worlds intertwine. The synchronicity between the real and the virtual dissolves and the boundary that was keeping them separate disappears, forming a unique space filled with a high oneiric charge.”

As for the sound, they say, “Lively and performed in real time – as with the images – the soundscape is a mix of electronic music, recorded acoustic instruments and realist noise environments calling to the imaginary. It aims to find a synaesthesia between the lighting and the movement of images and bodies. For instance, the electronic samples created live hybridise the electro-acoustic composition of a ukulele or of an electric guitar.”

And with the audience members on three sides of the cube here, this will be immersive for both the performer and us too.

– As part of La Fete 2016, Adrien M and Claire B’s “Hakanai” is at Chulalongkorn University’s Sodsai Pantoomkomol Centre for Dramatic Arts (BTS Siam, Exit 6), from September 13 to 15 at 7.30pm.

– Tickets are Bt1,000 (Bt500 each for a group of 4 or more) and Bt400 for students at http://www.BangkokStudio41.com.

– After Bangkok, the performance continues to Hanoi (September 24-25), Taipei (September 30-October 3), Tokyo (October 8-9), Nagano (October 12)  and Kanazawa (October 15-16).

– Visit http://www.AM-CB.net  (in French and English).