La Défense, acrobat experimentation ground

Is your image of La Défense made of asphalt, sleeveless down jackets and glass buildings? So get ready to change your perspective on the Parisian business district because for its 2026 cultural season, Les Extatiques is injecting a little art and poetry into public space. From June 8 to 12, it is the XY Collective, a company of acrobats created almost 20 years ago, which comes to defy the laws of gravity at the heart of La Défense and create a surprise.

The 2026 season of Les Extatiques began this April, with a program worthy of a museum. The exhibition “Under the Horizon”, nestled in the Salle des Colonnes located under the large arch, explored the marine depths with the mysterious and organic works of artists, visual artists and biologists. Now it’s time for the second part of Les Extatiques, with live shows, in a series of meetings light and airy, totally unexpected.

With “Les Voyages”, the XY Collective comes to surprise passers-by, at the bend of a metro exit or an alley, to present small acrobatic scenes. The Ecstatics announce: “For a week, the artists explore, with their body as the only material, the gesture of “carrying”, erected as a standard. A universal gesture that they reinvent in action, through an immersion in the territory which introduces slight disturbances of reality and invites everyone to reconsider their environment. » Present in all the districts of La Défense, the artists make urban architecture the terrain of their experiments, to do what they do best: explore movement, question the relationships between bodies and create a language from a given environment.

Although unpredictable, “Les Voyages” will still have a few meetings planned in advance, including Monday June 8 from 6 p.m. in the CNIT and at 6:30 p.m. in the Quatre Temps, Thursday June 11 at 6 p.m. at Place du bassin Agam, and Friday June 12 at 12:30 p.m. on Cours Valmy, in front of the Société Générale towers. You already know where to take your lunch break that day. And if you ever miss the boat or want more, the Collective XY will represent its “journeys” during Paris Summer, from July 13 to 19.

Above all, it would be a question of not forgetting the most anticipated meeting of the circus collective: on Tuesday June 9, XY comes to present a short version – and modified for the public space – of his show “Möbius”. It is on the steps of the great arch that the performance of this piece, already presented some 300 times in France and internationally, will take place. Inspired by the murmurations of starlings, these birds that fly away in flocks and coordinate in the sky, “Möbius” is an aerial, collective and infinitely precise piece.

“Continuing its research on acrobatic language, the XY Collective here inscribes the circus act in a continuous flow: a theater of transformations made of waves, explosions and temporal loops which respond to each other.”tease the Ecstatics. The date to note: June 9, at 12:30 p.m. then at 6:30 p.m., for 30 minutes of representation.

The third and final highlight of this cultural season will take place after the summer, in September: a photo exhibition entitled “Brèches†, and presented in an immersive way, in which the images are hidden in the urban landscape and the raw aesthetic of La Défense.

The Les Extatiques cultural season can be discovered in the La Défense district, in Paris, until the second half of 2026.

Konbini, partner of Extatiques.