La fin des temps

Show - Based on the novel by Haruki Murakami.

À la venue de l’automne, leurs corps se couvraient de longs poils dorés. Une teinte dorée dans le sens le plus pur, à laquelle ne pouvait se mêler aucune autre nuance. L’essence même de la couleur dorée, manifestée en ce monde.

Ils arboraient la teinte dorée la plus pure qui soit entre ciel et terre. Haruki Murakami, La Fin des temps ; traduit du japonais par Corinne Atlan,, Paris, Seuil, « Points  », 2013, p. 22.

Revealed to the general public in 1989, on the occasion of the bicentenary of the French Revolution, Philippe Decouflé had contributed, alongside Jean-Paul Goude, to the creation of the Parisian parade “Bleu Blanc Goude”, along the Avenue des Champs-Élysées.

Three years later, he became the master builder for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville.

It was the day after this event that he met the Japanese producer Miyako Kanamori: she then entrusted him with the adaptation of the Japanese tale Dora in the form of a musical, created in 1996 in Tokyo.

Twenty years later, Philippe Decouflé created, in Kanagawa, My Name is Shingo, another musical, based on Kazuo Umezu's science fiction manga.

And, in 2026, Miyako Kanamori proposed to Philippe Decouflé to direct the very first stage adaptation of one of Haruki Murakami's novels, one of the most widely read contemporary Japanese writers in the world: La Fin des temps.

Under the benevolent gaze of the author, the French choreographer embarked on a total work of art mixing theatre, music and dance, borrowing from the codes of musical comedy (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, West Side Story…), as well as from the tradition of Kabuki (an epic form of Japanese theatre).

Philippe Decouflé directed a troupe of nine actors and ten dancers around a hybrid show, lasting two hours and forty-five minutes, where a work of more than seven hundred pages is condensed.

Both director and choreographer, he will have both traced and sought the necessary refinement.