Philippe Quesne orchestrates a theatrical cabaret without actors, for lonely pianos and macabre rounds, set to music by Pierre Desprats. A theatrical attraction composed of volatile apparitions and magic lanterns, a workshop-world welcoming all projections.

In the literal sense, since the shadow of Étienne-Gaspard Robert, known as Robertson, hovers over the show: before becoming an enlightened amateur of hot air balloon trips at the beginning of the 19^th century, Robertson organised spooky evenings in crypts equipped with optical devices. He would promise to make spectres and ventriloquising women in white appear in his galvanising mirrors. In the years following the Reign of Terror, these séances were a response to the anxieties of the time and announced the future successes of spiritualist mediums, romantic nights in hell and rides mixing technology and the supernatural, up to the first cinema, its hucksters and its fake and suggestive tricks. Dialoguing with the heritage of these fantastic universes, Philippe Quesne stages a strange theatre populated by ghosts, spectral ancestors or seer-poets. The musical composition of Pierre Desprats gives life to a cemetery of mismatched mechanical pianos, celibate machines haunted by multiple musical evocations. The instruments come alive to the rhythm of macabre dances, unstable images and incantatory fumes, equivocal traces of an afterlife. The French director, accustomed to bringing possible and alternative worlds to life, unveils a memorial, melancholic and theatrical meta-world, a fairground ritual to exorcise fatality.