This isn’t your usual night at the theater. “A Surrealist Conference” takes audiences into a dreamlike world where puppets whisper, shadows drift, and ghosts slip across the stage. Created by Nancy Rusek, Eric de Sarria, Geng Yun, and Gu Jingsheng, the 50-minute visual theater piece blurs the line between reality and illusion with movement, objects, and light instead of dialogue. Think of it as stepping into a living dream.

This visual theater piece, created by Nancy Rusek and Eric de Sarria in collaboration with Geng Yun and Gu Jingsheng, explores the shifting boundaries between reality and illusion. In this performance, images speak louder than words, movement outweighs posture, and music surpasses speech.

It is not a conventional performance, but rather a poetic and absurd dreamscape where a woman meets a man, the man encounters a puppet, the puppet crosses paths with a shadow, the shadow follows a ghost, and the ghost returns to the woman. Characters, puppets, shadows, and ghosts repeatedly intersect within disoriented time and space, blurring the line between the real and the imagined.

Puppets whisper, shadows wander, and ghosts slide across the pages as the world folds and transforms. In a theater shaped by puppets, paper ghosts, and absurd magic, meaning is unraveled, logic broken, leaving behind only visual impact and a poetic current. Within paper folds, figures and puppets dance together, shadows weave fate across labyrinth walls, and memories drift like bottles on a sea of time. Storms tear open the sky, masks fall away, and silence resets everything—until the cycle begins anew. This surreal, 50-minute journey draws the audience into a dreamlike theater of poetry and illusion.

Cast and Crew’s Note

“A Surrealist Conference” centers on visual storytelling, breaking away from language-driven theater. Instead, it builds emotion and imagery through bodies, objects, light, shadow, and fluid space.

The work dissolves boundaries between people and objects, reality and illusion, past and future. Fragile materials—paper, fabric, puppets, chairs—become living characters and vessels of memory within a dreamworld that walks, collapses, and restarts in cycles.

The piece follows a circular narrative, where separation, loss, and return unfold in silence. Changing lights and images create spatial illusions and psychological disorientation, immersing audiences in a flowing consciousness. Inspired by object theater and surreal visual traditions, particularly the work of Philippe Genty, the production seeks to reveal a nonverbal form of storytelling that reaches directly to the heart.

More than a dream-journey, this piece is a meditation on memory, existence, and belonging, allowing audiences to experience disorientation and, through it, rediscover themselves.

Creators

• Nancy Rusek studied at the Royal Ballet School of Flanders, later shifting to contemporary dance. She worked with choreographers including Andy Degroat and Philippe Decouflé, and later collaborated with Philippe Genty, touring internationally and teaching. She is certified in the Feldenkrais Method and holds a French state diploma in contemporary dance.
• Eric de Sarria has collaborated with Philippe Genty since 1988, performing in and co-creating numerous productions while also teaching and directing internationally.
• Yun Geng is a theater artist and puppetry creator, currently a PhD candidate at the University of Kent. Her practice spans stage design, puppetry, and cross-cultural theater projects.
• Jingsheng Gu is an actor and teacher specializing in the Suzuki Method, with more than 300 students trained worldwide. He teaches internationally and promotes cross-cultural approaches to performance.

Production

• Mots de Tête Compagnie (France), founded by Eric de Sarria, is dedicated to experimental puppetry and visual theater rooted in Philippe Genty’s traditions, combining object theater, physical expression, and striking visual design.
• Resonate Horizon Theatre (China) focuses on contemporary visual theater, blending Suzuki training, puppetry, body theater, and object performance, alongside international collaborations and workshops.