Les Affluents is an encounter between eight individuals. Eight people in a place, obliged to be there. Brought together, as we are all, in the public eye, to interact. Les Affluents is a meeting of people who experience what encounters mean. Mean ? Randomness, fragility, expectation, discomfort. Here, those who acquire that experience are ourselves also. Also participating, we sense the confrontation, we feel that it must play a part in our personal construction. And afterwards, it may be that we are richer for the experience – but we will never be the same. Every encounter is fraught with risk. Risk – in various forms or at various levels – of attaint to our mind or our body, but in all cases risk to the self that by familiarity we think we know. In choreographing this work, I wanted to examine the risk implied by encounters. To restate the precarity of the human condition, faced with the threat that might be inherent in every new human contact. To give a reminder that a caress can be the prelude to a stranglehold, a kiss to a devouring, a word to a torrent of hate, a silence to a total collapse. Encounters are not just that – but they can also be that. We draw the power to defend ourselves, to parry against attack, from our experience and from the powers that bring us together. The powers that melt us as individuals into an anonymous amalgam in which – we hope – joy may also be present. Les Affluents is a distorted, tragi-comic view of reality, where risk is overstated, and where derision can overturn a situation even to the point of highlighting it. Nightmarish terrors, reassuring laughter, imagined ogres, sheets to hide under. A reminder of childhood, that far-off time when we believed that fears would one day disappear. Philippe Saire, choreographer