La Machine des sens (The Sensory Machine)

Recently, we’ve felt a shift of needs as the digital world has connected us in an increasingly isolating manner. Who are we to ourselves? To others? To our communities? À la fin de la journée, qu’est-ce qui nous lie l’un à l’autre?

After the inspirational work put on through years of work by numerous creators (dancers, academics, cultural workers, theatre-makers, and many more) for its digital project, The Centre Cannot Hold, Postmarginal was left with an ever-pervasive pull towards how we can explore new ways of inclusive creative practices. Although it’s incredibly helpful to think and play and explore how the creation process can live and breathe, there can often still be a vacuum left for something big, something that sticks, provokes, and maybe even amazes. With that, we’re excited to share with you the inaugural production of Postmarginal Projects Inc.: La Machine des sens (The Sensory Machine).

WHAT IS THE MACHINE DES SENS?

La Machine des sens is a 70-minute immersive theatrical experience designed for small groups of 15 to 30 participants. Audiences move through a carefully choreographed sensory journey spread across multiple floors of a warehouse. Four distinct artistic worlds—created by Gaëtane Cummings, Cai Glover, Art Babayants, and Cassel—form a constellation of immersive “stations” that the public encounters through a guided yet exploratory pathway.

This new production aims to call for a world where humans, not digital beings, and connection, not polarization, take the lead. Even more, we hope it can offer a balm to our troubling times. 

We’re happy to introduce the four leading and award-winning creators who will help bring this work to life: Gaëtane Cummings, Art Babayants, Cassel, and Cai Glover. Working with or between their different psychological, artistic, and physical perspectives, these four creators will explore and create individual 10 to 20-minute works that, with the support of our creative team, will explore how the senses can intersect in a journey by working with technological devices to create a playful and moving public experience. More specifically:

• Gaëtane Cummings, a multidisciplinary crip artist whose work synthesizes experiences into spontaneous art that intuitively represents life on the margins, plans for a theatrical installation that invites the public to engage with in a nature installation that delves into our relationship with the natural world and disability. 

• Art Babayants, a theatre artist, director, and teacher known for his work and research in multilingual theatre, will be exploring Un touchée de Tango Queer a dance-theatre production in a silent and participatory form aimed at deconstructing the dance style’s gendered/binary roots;

• Cassel, artist, writer and founder of the theatre company Nonante, looks to present an excerpt of Tremblements: La poésie de mes changements climatiques, a poetic and scientific theatrical exploration of the experience of trembling with a person living with Parkinson’s;

• Cai Glover, a dancer, choreographer and founder of the dance company A Fichu Turning, offers Disorder. Through dance and motion-triggered sound, the work immerses audiences in their unique auditory worlds—juxtaposing the distorted stimuli of devices with the demands of a society clinging to “normalcy.”