Pour Echo (For Echo) is a commissioned performance presented at the Eco Festival in February 2026, whose programme is shaped around Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Marie-Caroline Hominal brings a one-off piece dedicated to the nymph Echo: the one who loves Narcissus, but who can never tell him so because her tongue has been cut out, leaving her able only to repeat the ends of other people’s sentences.
The performer enters from the back of the arena. She stops beside a standing microphone. Before anything else, she makes a few offerings to the audience, seated on a large circular stage. From the oversized inner pockets of her oversized coat she pulls: a packet of crisps. Then another. A potted plant. Pof—the crisp packets spring open with a burst of air. The packets spin. The plant is placed beside a spectator, as if it too had come to watch the performance. This is all going to be casual. We are together. We are amused.

Pour Echo is structured around a sequence that returns several times, linking together: a highly poetic litany of the performance’s addressees; an attempt, always interrupted, to tell the story of this nymph; live hair, make-up and nail treatments performed on the artist herself; and dance. The cycle keeps turning in this order. For all the lies and the perfumes for life and death and life and death a rose is a rose is a rose for all the Amazons during the Trojan War and so many others for all the girls on Boulevard Helvétique waiting for clients etc.

There are also sound loops triggered from a standing microphone. Echoes for Echo. And those offerings, made to the audience with complete informality: crisps and flowers, then langues de chat biscuits. There is, finally, a television screen that occasionally broadcasts surreal scenes from a Fellini-designed ecclesiastical fashion show. Marie-Caroline can do everything: speak, dance, drift below or above the fabric of the performance, lose the thread, play with rupture, turn tragic, turn light, and yet still hold it all together.

What matters here is that we hear the refrain as it returns: the opening of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. It is to the call of this fable of the murder of a young Chosen One, to the sounds of this ritual that has set so much dancing in motion, that she dances. At the centre of the circle. Through successive metamorphoses. Freely. Gracefully. That slow, mythical bassoon seems to signal from afar, linking the young girl sacrificed to welcome the spring with the gallery of victims, raped women and abducted women who populate Ovid’s Metamorphoses. A spectator crunches on crisps. Another chews a langue de chat biscuit. A thoughtful aperitif before the Chosen One is put to death? For all those who do not have a penny left for all the children from here and elsewhere for an invisible movement incomprehensible gestures etc.

The performer finally exits wearing the shoes of a wading bird. Of a drag queen. Of inspirational beauty. Of a streetwalker. She takes the circle of The Rite and turns it into a sublime catwalk. Fellini’s bobbing, cornette-clad nuns trail behind her like ghosts. She leaves.

The coat remains at the centre of the sacrificial circle, like a cast-off skin. Perhaps there is a severed tongue beneath it. Echo’s. The Chosen One’s. Or someone else’s. There is no shortage of candidates at this festival of the mutilated. Nothing has been said. Everything has been said. For day for night day night day night.