The creation of the show required six months of work. It met with great success (150 performances, 14000 audience members) in France and abroad. During the Tokyo festival, the show was broadcast fully by the television service NHK with a Japanese translation.

Oratorio pour une vie is a scenic and philosophical poem in which light and music play an important role. The word “oratorio” usually refers to a lyrical work written as a dramatic dialogue with a religious topic, but it is used in a secular way here. The choir’s songs and music from the German band Tangerine Dream accompany the action. The light effects created by Jacques Denis also contribute to the creation and transformations of space – black and white like day and night.

After a long silent prologue evoking the creation of the world and then the fertilisation of an ovum by a “ballet of spermatozoids”, the Poète (Poet) brings into focus the birth of two characters – Homme (Man) and then Femme (Woman). They both feel the “tragic desire to be made complete”. They make love and are thus made whole. But disease, infidelity, weapons and secrets appear with the birth of the city. Homme and Femme forget one another. A new concrete city takes over the old one, and no space is left for emotions. Homme finds himself in a crowd led by money, proprietorship and the market. Why waste your life for machines, Homme asks? Why give birth to children in a world that is filled with pain, Femme asks as an echo? Determined “not to accept the unacceptable”, “not to allow to not live” and to “organise the dream”, they meet again before fading into the growing darkness.