The Flight of the Hypothalamus is a scenic ceremony for the dead at sea. The piece activates a collective ritual through the installation of an altar where life is sung, evoked and celebrated. The myth of the Abayomis dolls (Abayomis means precious encounter) is intertwined with the life experience of teenagers and young people from Congo, Cameroon, Morocco, Liberia, Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Senegal.

How to deconstruct the stereotypes projected on migrant bodies and listen to the memories and knowledge they bring from their countries  and their mother tongues? How to learn from them and with them? This play explores the experience of young immigrants in an irregular administrative situation in Europe. Bodies that migrate, inhabit and rewrite a city; transitions between childhood and adulthood. A piece built on the basis of collective laboratories of reparative imagination and fictions. 

When Bay, a young Senegalese, was crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a dinghy, an Abayomi from the depths of the sea fell at his feet. Abayomis were dolls made by enslaved women to soothe the crying and pain of their children. They tore off their clothes and made them with six knots, in each knot, a prayer, a wish and a blessing, as a symbol of love, protection, joy and resistance. 

In these crossings of endless frontiers, The Flight of the Hypothalamus captures desired futures in a sea of voices from the present and the past. The Abayomis dolls, woven from the hair of the bodies that have gone through the process of creating this piece, summon the audience to a collective song, a song of pleasure and protest.