Opéra Pagaï's Entreprise de Détournement

Opéra Pagaï's performance interventions in Entreprise de Détournement ¹ appear unexpectedly in an urban public space, propose previously unimagined possibilities for the city and then disappear, but the memory of the various hijackings of reality haunts the place for passers-by who experience them. Between 2004 and 2011, Opéra Pagaï, a street theatre company based in Bordeaux, France, developed a series of six durational site-specific theatrical interventions in public spaces. Each one was unique to the city in France in which it took place. ² Opéra Pagaï calls these interventions “utopias of proximity” that, Artistic Director Cyril Jaubert explains, create “a false history told to the city, a subversion of reality, a surrealistic image but still quite real.” ³ These performative interventions seem to strive for what Ernst Bloch called a “utopian consciousness [that] wants to look far into the distance, but ultimately only in order to penetrate the darkness so near it of the just lived moment, ⋯ to penetrate precisely the nearest nearness.” ⁴ The last three sites of Entreprise de Détournement (Chantiers #4, #5, and #6) in particular create performative utopias, each of which is both a better place and yet also a no-place or an imagined possibility of radical social transformation. Although each intervention pushes at the limits of credibility, it simultaneously remains within the bounds of the conceivable, as it offers an event close enough to the reality of the city's inhabitants that it hovers between something a bit strange but still possible and a fantastical exaggeration.