Jean-Christophe Maillot, director of Les Ballets de Monte Carlo, invited Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui to create a piece for his company. Inspired by the people dying in his family and as an ode to the departed, Cherkaoui wanted to honor his ancestors with this meditative performance. The bond between reality and memory is at the core of In Memoriam. Set in an imaginary underworld, the dancers use magnetic forces to revive each other. They explore the movements of attraction and repulsion, magnetism and antimagnetism, in order to examine the meaning of the word ‘harmony’. Tenderness (attraction) and aggression (repulsion) spring from the same source in an intimate game of polarization. Ascending, leaping and falling, they twirl like dervishes and orbit around each other, never touching, until finally one couple kisses. In Memoriam also marked the beginning of a rewarding collaboration with the Corsican polyphonic ensemble A Filetta headed by Jean-Claude Aquaviva.