Vertige, Manhattan Transfert: immersive theater at Chaillot in January 2027

From January 13 to 16, 2027, Léonard Matton and the Emersiøn company present Vertige, Manhattan Transfert at Chaillot, in Paris’s 16th arrondissement. An immersive theater experience in which the audience moves freely among the characters created by John Dos Passos, in early 20th-century New York.

A novel you walk through. From January 13 to 16, 2027, Vertige, Manhattan Transfer invites audiences to explore New York as it was from 1900 to 1920 at Chaillot – Théâtre national de la Danse, on Place du Trocadéro, in Paris’s 16th arrondissement. Conceived by Léonard Matton and produced by compagnie Emersiøn, this immersive production adapted from John Dos Passos’s work blends theater, music, dance and film. Its ambition: to convey the headlong pace of a city where industry, money and new technologies are reshaping people’s lives.

In practice, several scenes unfold simultaneously in different spaces. Audience members can move around, follow a character, then branch off to another storyline. Twelve actresses play nearly a hundred roles: journalists, workers, artists, immigrants and figures of power cross paths in this “city-play,” as the company calls it. Following one story therefore means letting another slip away. The format embraces this choice, while also including scenes that bring the entire audience together and allow the storylines to converge.

This flow mirrors the structure of Manhattan Transfer, the novel published by John Dos Passos in 1925. Among the lives that unfold in this sweeping portrait, Ellen Thatcher’s is central: a young woman who dreams of the stage and climbs the ranks of show business, at the cost of major compromises. Around her are the journalist Jimmy Herf and the lawyer George Baldwin. Their ambitions and disillusionments reveal the flip side of the American Dream in a metropolis where some people’s success is also built on others’ insecurity.

To bring this bustle to life, jazz will be performed live, as Chaillot notes on its website, while projections conjure up a shifting New York streetscape. Also on offer is a cinema space featuring silent films alongside images created for the show, as well as period telephones that let visitors talk with a virtual operator. These devices extend a question that runs through the production: how do technological inventions transform our relationships, our imaginations and our bodies? Following Helsingør, Hamlet’s Castle and The Plague, Measure for Measure, Léonard Matton continues his exploration of immersive theatre. All that remains is to choose whom to follow.

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