As part of the IDEAL Festival, Verónica Calvo Valenzuela and Capucine Dufour presented Gradiver, a performance exploring walking as a gesture of attention and interpretation. Conceived as a hybrid form between choreographic practice and sensory inquiry, the piece invites the audience to observe, feel, and question the ways in which space is inhabited through walking. Presented at the Théâtre Universitaire on March 23, 2026, and at the Musée d’arts de Nantes on March 28, 2026, it is part of an ongoing creative process, open to dialogue and experimentation.
The following article offers a reflection by Marie Jeannenot, an intern this spring within the Chair Inhabiting through the prism of planetary boundaries, who attended both performances.
© Aurore Petit - Maison Fumetti
For the first performance, we gathered in the research room of the Théâtre Universitaire. The audience, seated on a raised platform, faced a large performance space where Verónica Calvo Valenzuela and Capucine Dufour presented a form of performative conversation. After a brief introduction, Capucine began walking in a circle, immediately drawing attention and perhaps raising questions. Standing slightly apart, Verónica then began to describe her walk.
Her initial observations were precise and physical: “you place your heel first,” “your shoulders are slightly forward,” before gradually shifting toward more sensitive and symbolic interpretations: “you don’t have an urban walk,” “I wonder if you carry the walk of other women,” “I wonder if you like to walk.”
The roles were then reversed, marked by the sound of a bell. Each ring introduced a new way of walking, a new dynamic, and a new lens of description. The contrast between slow, hesitant, and scattered movements—sometimes close to dance, moving backward, or guided by a gesture—shaped the audience’s perception, inviting them not only to follow the descriptions but also to project their own interpretations. One of the sequences also incorporated everyday objects, further expanding the range of sensations and narratives.
The second performance, at the Musée d’arts de Nantes, offered a very different relationship to space. Presented in a room dedicated to the Territoires exhibition path—focused on new ways of representing and inhabiting landscapes—the setting resonated directly with the themes explored. Positioned at the same level, the audience was more immersed in the experience. While the walks themselves remained similar, their descriptions adapted to the context, entering into dialogue with the museum environment.
In both cases, a discussion followed the performance, extending the experience. The artists elaborated on the underlying questions of their work, particularly their interest in the figure of Gradiva, whose distinctive foot posture becomes a metaphor for our earthly condition: to be human is always to be in relation to the ground. They also spoke about the points of connection they identified between their respective practices, which led them to these performative conversations. In particular, they evoked the notion of the threshold, understood as a space of transition, transformation, and heightened attention, where the act of walking becomes a way of moving through and inhabiting intermediate states.
They also took time to explain their method: each sequence is based on the choice of a walk, a description, and a lens of interpretation. The whole constitutes an ongoing research process, of which only certain variations are presented here.
Discussions with the audience brought out various lines of reflection. At the Théâtre Universitaire, spectators shared personal experiences related to walking and referred to Roger-Pol Droit, who describes walking as a continuously compensated imbalance. At the museum, conversations focused more on intention and attention: do we always walk toward a goal? Is it possible to walk without direction, beyond any function? And do we truly pay attention to the way we walk
From these two experiences, a shared question emerged: what does the body teach us about the way we inhabit a place, about how we sense the ground we walk upon? From this perspective, walking becomes a tool for sensory inquiry, at the intersection of anthropology and choreographic practice. Through this research, the aim is to explore what the body reveals about our relationship to the world: how we perceive places, how we situate ourselves within them, and how our gestures fully contribute to our way of being in the world.
