Dans l’oubli

Interweaving music and narrative, this staged concert takes the audience on a deeply moving journey through the labyrinth of a fading mind. Inspired by the words of the Dutch artist Spinvis, the performance unfolds in eight scenes, portraying a doctor who, after spending years caring for patients with neurocognitive disorders, discovers the initial symptoms of the condition in himself.

Gradually, what seemed to be only other people’s stories – told in the form of funny or poignant anecdotes – becomes his own. Lucidity begins to crack, memory frays, confusion sets in –until he is engulfed by silence and music.

From Brahms to Kaija Saariaho and Panayiotis Kokoras, each work performed by Aedes reveals one of the many facets of dementia: anxiety, hallucinations, forgetfulness, suspicion, panic… David Fennessy’s moving Letter to Michael, in which we hear the desperate plea of a patient in a psychiatric hospital begging her husband to come and collect her, conveys with rare intensity the fear and abandonment that people afflicted by this condition also experience.

Between pain and tenderness, despair and fragments of humanity, this production offers an unforgettable experience that explores the meaning of loss and the fading of the self.

French premiere on 20 January 2027 at the Philharmonie de Paris