Joanne Leighton presents the performance The Vigil for 730 participants : one person, every morning and every evening, keeps watch over the city and its surroundings for one hour, at sunrise and sunset. Each is seated inside a shelter designed by set designer Benjamin Tovo—this continues, day after day, for 365 days.

Being present in a specific site, becoming both actor and observer, taking part in a collective yet deeply individual experience, rediscovering a landscape at dawn or dusk while keeping one’s senses fully awake, opening one’s gaze to the horizon and feeling the encounter between body and landscape… this is the essence of the performance, in which each participant lives their own experience of a fundamental concept in choreographic practice : the quality of presence.

This moment, outside the demands of daily life, is a privileged time that each Vigil offers to themselves. This hour becomes an opportunity to surrender to the poetry of the present while being fully aware of taking part in a human-scale adventure that belongs to both a community and its territory.

The Vigil is a standing figure, taking on the civic responsibility of watching over their city. The performance echoes the personal stories of the Vigil, while simultaneously a community forms around the project. It is poetic—and it is also a form of resistance, silent and peaceful.

Is it the Vigil observing the performance of the city, or the passerby witnessing the performance of the Vigil ?

For Joanne Leighton, the choreographic investment of specific sites opens up a dialogue with space, allowing new perceptions and social attitudes to emerge. It is a sensitive re-reading of urban or natural environments, of what they represent, and of the processes they generate. Every reading of a landscape or site is historically and socially constructed—and inseparable from the one who observes it.