Babel, by Mourad Merzouki: the show that makes Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche dance - our opinion

This autumn, Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche raises the curtain on Babel, the new show by hip-hop icon Mourad Merzouki. From September 4 to December 31, 2025, every Thursday, Friday and Saturday evening when the department store closes, ten circus artists and dancers will perform a spellbinding choreographic creation.

The curtain has almost come down on Babel, Mourad Merzouki's new show at Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche every Thursday, Friday and Saturday evening from September 4 to December 31, 2025. Following on from the success of Au Bonheur des Dames and Entre Chiens et Louves, the department store offers us a new show that's sure to knock you off your feet!

As the last customers slip away and the windows darken, the décor lights up... The stage is set for an extraordinary show that makes shelves dance and imaginations fly. Ten performers - circus artists and dancers - wander through a vertiginous scenography, carried by a poetic breath and an energy to decorate the racks. Babel is a spellbinding tour de piste, where bodies tell the story of a utopia in motion: that of a world that unites rather than divides, where differences become a collective force.

At the helm is Mourad Merzouki, choreographer and figurehead of the contemporary hip-hop movement, known for his creations combining dance, circus, martial arts, visual arts and music. With his company Käfig, founded in 1996, he has produced a string of hit shows(Pixel, Vertikal, Folia, Zéphyr, Phénix, Beauséjour), with a total audience of over two million.

Our opinion:

Forget everything you thought you knew about the Tower of Babel. In Mourad Merzouki's work, it does not reach for the clouds... it plunges towards the earth. And what a descent! In the dreamlike setting imagined at Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche, the famous biblical myth is transformed into a poetic and breathless odyssey, where dance and circus come together to build a better world—together.

At the center of the stage stands a monumental tower, the backbone of the show. In perpetual motion, this structure unfolds throughout the performance, revealing apparatus and flying devices for the artists. Designed as a360° set, it places the audience at the heart of the action, spread across the three levels of the department store.

Around this inverted Babel, ten dancer-acrobats gravitate, spin, leap, and embrace in an aerial choreography of raw beauty, between gravity and lightness. Without a word, they build together what the legend never completed: a Babel where diversity becomes a common language.

The narrative is minimalist, allowing the power of the movement to speak for itself. The audience—whether seated on the ground floor, first floor, or second floor—becomes complicit in this journey between heaven and earth, immersed in an experience that is both dizzying and deeply human.

Marc Debard's music, a clever blend of classical and electronic sounds, reinforces the dramatic tension while amplifying the poetry of the movements.

With Babel, Mourad Merzouki celebrates an ideal: that of a world united by movement. Between heaven and earth, Mourad Merzouki composes a hymn to the beauty of the collective, where art brings people together rather than divides them.