‘The first feeling is fear’: the daredevil group bringing ropewalking and climbing to the theatre | Dance

You can look the video up online: a man balancing on an inch-wide rope, carefully putting one foot in front of another. He is 70 metres above the ground, behind him is the vast Eiffel Tower, below him the River Seine. From a distance, the speck of him fades into the cityscape.

This is Nathan Paulin. He is a French highliner, another term for a tightrope walker, except that Paulin uses a slackline – the name is fairly self-explanatory – and he’s never been near a circus. Paulin is usually to be found rigging his slackline between two mountains in the Alps, or walking a record-breaking 2.2km, 100m in the air, to the island of Mont Saint Michel off the Normandy coast, wind whirling around him. “The first feeling is always fear,” says Paulin, 29, talking of the moment he steps out on the line. “But after the first few steps I start to feel comfortable. When I’m on the line, I feel more sensitive about everything. I’m not a spectator but I feel like I belong to the environment. I can hear everything around me.”

The destination for the Eiffel Tower walk was the Théâtre National de Chaillot, Paris’s dedicated dance theatre on the north bank of the river, where choreographer Rachid Ouramdane is artistic director. Ouramdane lives between Paris and the French Alps, where he’s surrounded by people who spend their time mountaineering and paragliding. He had noticed the way they talked about scaling up or jumping off mountains, not just in terms of seeking an adrenaline rush. Rather “it revealed a kind of deep philosophy, a way to connect to nature, an incredible awareness of the living world around them”.

That was something Ouramdane wanted to explore as an artist. First by inviting Paulin to walk across the Seine, then trying to translate what he does to inside the theatre, along with eight acrobats from Compagnie XY and the Swiss free climber Nina Caprez in a performance called Corps Extrêmes, which Ouramdane calls “halfway between a documentary and an art piece”. The piece arrives at Sadler’s Wells on 23 May for a two-night run.

Caprez, 36, has already chronicled many of her climbs, on film (the documentaries Swissway to Heaven and WoGü) and on her blog. There is jaw-dropping footage of her climbing in the Alps and elsewhere, scaling seemingly sheer cliffsides, fingers and toes finding invisible holds, conquering overhanging rocks, laughing, falling, swearing and triumphantly pulling her way to the summit.

“Since I love sharing my climbing experience with a large audience, I was really keen to join the project, even though I had no idea what the outcome would be,” says Caprez. “I was just trusting Rachid. I had no idea who he was but I found him really funny, he had a really good way with people.”

She and Paulin didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. “It was totally new to me that environment,” Caprez says. “I never work in a group, really, I’m mostly hanging alone on my wall. Often Nathan and I were just watching, like: ‘OK, what the hell are we doing here?!’” For Paulin, used to standing alone in the sky in vast open landscapes, being inside the studio “was like being a bird in a cage”, he says.

Out of their natural habitat, gradually Paulin and Caprez came to make sense of the theatre, especially once the audience arrived. “Now I really get it,” says Caprez. “It’s not just people watching a video at home, but being in this room, feeling the vibes. This is what I’m most excited about.”

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Corps extrêmes. Choreographer Rachid Ouramdane. Photograph: © Pascale Cholette

Paulin agrees: “There is no way to cheat. We have Instagram and all these videos where you can make people think you’re doing something crazy just because you film it this way or that way. Here you are for an hour on stage with 1,000 people watching you.” The physical risk might not be as great as, say, free climbing El Capitan, but the stakes are raised in a different way.

Once I touch the rock there are no more thoughts – Nina Caprez

Caprez has also picked up some new skills as an acrobat. She and the performers from Compagnie XY climb, hang, jump and fall, throw and catch each other and balance precariously. The set for the show began with a single slackline high above the stage, and a blank, flat, white climbing wall. Then the team went to the Gorges du Verdon in the south of France, and filmed Carpez climbing and Paulin highlining so that the images could be projected on to the stage. The audience too will be able to get up close with the texture of the rock and the awesomeness of the landscape, while they hear the performers’ thoughts in voiceover.

It is thrilling to get even a small sense of what Caprez and Paulin experience. “Once I touch the rock there are no more thoughts,” says Caprez. “There’s no consciousness about anything, but everything is there. Your sensitivity is so high that actually you can do incredible things.” Any average person would be terrified, looking down at a few hundred metres’ drop, but Caprez says: “I don’t feel fear, I feel excited, and this excitement really guides me to a high level of awareness and I totally live in the present. I don’t project myself to the past or the future. I don’t see myself climbing the top. The only thing that counts is metre by metre, step by step, pitch by pitch. It’s a very special state of mind.”

Caprez has written about when her daughter was born with a heart defect and had to have surgery at a few months old. The only thing she could think to do to keep her sanity while they waited for news on her four-hour surgery was to go climbing. “That was the hardest experience of my life and climbing then was more like an escape,” she says, “because no matter what’s in my life I can turn off my brain. It makes me think positive; it gives me power.” The surgery was a success and her daughter is now fine.

Nathan Paulin’s world record slackline walk at Le Mont Saint-Michel. Photograph: Damien Meyer/AFP/Getty Images

You must feel powerful out on the highline, too, I say to Paulin, when you’re defying what seems possible, putting physics on hold. Sure, he says, “but I also feel so small. You feel that you are nothing. Sometimes you feel you are doing something hard and you are mastering it, you are able to deal with the line moving and the wind, but at the same time you are just dealing with the elements, you are not the master. You are just a little guy walking on the line.

“I really like to feel things,” he adds. “Some of my best memories on the highlines were when it was windy and rainy and I can feel more. You can feel it with your skin.” Ouramdane brings up a quote he heard recently: that we teach people to appreciate literature and maths, but not the rain on our faces. Paulin has found a way to embrace that lesson.

So the extreme body of the show’s title is less about the cast’s formidable acrobatic feats, more about the superpowers of our senses. “It’s a choreography of awareness,” says Ouramdane. He refers to the apocryphal idea of the Inuit having 100 words for snow. “When you speak with Nathan or Nina they start to make visible nuances you don’t usually perceive,” he says. “I remember when we were shooting, Nina said we should go fast because soon the texture of the rocks will be different. She knows the rhythm of the day, and the fact the rocks will change after a certain time of being in the sun, even if it’s the same rock.”

There is definitely a message in Corps Extrêmes about how out of tune we’ve become with our environment, how we can only survive by working with nature, not against it. “What we try to touch on is the vulnerability of those people being in a place that is not normal for a human.” Or rather, from a distance it looks like vulnerability, but because they can activate this hyper-awareness of their surroundings, “you realise their fragility is not a weakness,” says Ouramdane. “But it could become a strength when you know how to use it.”

Corps Extrêmes is at Sadler’s Wells, London, 23 & 24 May.