Their translucent bodies stand out against the half-light of the Théâtre Joliette, revealing their fragility. 

The protagonists of “Les Vagues”, a creation presented on Tuesday in Marseille, are puppets made of ice, an ephemeral material that allows them to “pass through time”, like Virginia Woolf’s characters.

Between these characters, whom the British writer’s novel follows “from their earliest childhood to a very old age”, and their frosted, human-sized effigies, “there was a kind of correspondence”, like “an obviousness”, explained director and visual artist Elise Vigneron, who has been working with ice for some ten years.

“It’s a really fascinating material because it’s completely ephemeral,” she added, “and at the same time, there’s the possibility of passing through history or freezing.”