Du Charbon Dans Les Veines

Radiant-Bellevue welcomes Du Charbon Dans Les Veines

At Radiant-Bellevue in Caluire-et-Cuire, just north of Lyon, we take pride in inviting artists who bring powerful stories to the stage and invite audiences to look—and listen—more closely. That is precisely why we are thrilled to host Du Charbon Dans Les Veines, a performance that speaks with the urgency of lived experience while embracing the intimacy of a confidant’s whisper. From our vantage point as a venue dedicated to live arts, we recognize in this creation a rare balance of dramaturgic clarity and sensory richness: spoken word that breathes, music that anchors the narrative, and images that open a window onto landscapes scarred and dignified by work. Our room’s enveloping acoustics and sightlines were designed for pieces like this—works that ask audiences to lean forward, to discern textures of memory, and to receive the fullness of a voice carried by craft. Welcoming this production is consistent with our season-long commitment to projects that combine artistic refinement with social resonance.

A staging shaped by memory, matter, and the Radiant-Bellevue stage

Du Charbon Dans Les Veines travels across generations, mapping the terrain of mines, families, and the gestures that persist long after the shafts have closed. On our stage, the piece unfolds with the clarity of documentary theatre and the pulse of a concert, where silence is as expressive as melody and a detail—a hand on a lunch pail, a lamplight’s halo—tells an entire story. The scenography favors the essential: live narration, a musical palette that shifts from hushed motifs to raw, percussive breaths, and visual elements that surface like memory itself, fragment by fragment. Our technical team has shaped a sound design that envelops without overwhelming, allowing the performer’s phrasing to cut cleanly through layers of ambiance, and lighting that sculpts space into chambers of recollection—coal-dust greys, tungsten warmth, and sudden shafts of white. The result is a shared hush in the auditorium, the kind of collective listening that is increasingly rare and that our hall was built to cultivate. By the time the final image recedes, the audience understands why this story needed a stage as immediate and human as Radiant-Bellevue.

As a house committed to a living conversation between artists and audiences, we also keep an attentive eye on the artist’s current trajectory. In recent months, the creative momentum surrounding Du Charbon Dans Les Veines has expanded beyond the performance itself, with new collaborations in sound and text that extend the work’s investigation of transmission, territory, and the dignity of labor. Workshops and public encounters have followed the tour, focusing on how personal archives—photographs, letters, recorded voices—can be transformed into shared dramaturgy. From our perspective, this ongoing practice matters: it anchors the evening you’ll experience here within a broader cycle of creation, one that tests ideas in rehearsal rooms, community spaces, and stages across the country. Presenting Du Charbon Dans Les Veines at Radiant-Bellevue is therefore more than a booking in a calendar; it is an invitation to witness an artist refining language and form in real time, and to encounter a stagecraft that trusts the audience’s intelligence. We have tailored our reception of the piece—stage dimensions, sound checks, seating configuration—to heighten its intimacy and to let every breath and musical contour reach the far rows with the same nuance as the front. In this way, our venue becomes part of the storytelling architecture, a living instrument tuned to the beat of a work that carries coal, memory, and resilience in its veins.