The work of Grand Magasin and Philippe Quesne, like that of other contemporary French artists such as Jérôme Bel, Xavier Le Roy, Yves-Noël Genod, Loïc Touzé and Joris Lacoste, is located in an artistic field that defies disciplinary definition. From roughly the start of the 1990s, each of these solo artists and companies has, in turn, abandoned classical dance and text-based theatre in order to create new choreographies and dramaturgies that are no longer centred on perfecting the technique of the dancing body or in creating dramatic conflict. For them, the key is to use the immediacy of performance to undertake an acute observation of reality in all its heterogeneity and brute materiality. This exploratory work which treats reality as an archaeological site discloses the presence of "things' whose proximity, everydayness and banality usually prevent them from being seen. In Jérôme Bel by Jérôme Bel (1995), the body is revealed in its most prosaic form — through the display of skin, folds, orifices and hair; in Xavier Le Roy's Produit de circonstances (Product of Circumstance, 1999), small-scale biographical anecdotes triumph over spectacular events and moments of crisis; and in Purgatoire (Purgatory, 2007), Joris Lacoste explores how the sometimes risky co-presence of performer and spectator problematizes the vicarious effects of fiction.