Having completed an initial long-term work entitled BARBARE on the member countries of the European Union from 2019 to 2022, the artists Mélodie Lasselin and Simon Capelle take on Europe with a view to creating a work for peace and questioning the figure of the enemy. When the creative team woke up the day after the first performances of BARBARE and learned that war had broken out in Ukraine, ENEMY, a project already under consideration, became an emergency and a necessity. Zone-Poème seeks to "leave the borders of the European Union, which guarantee us a certain stability, to leave the interior and go and see the state of countries that are close to joining the European Union or, on the contrary, are nowhere near due to ongoing territorial conflicts." The production of ENEMY (a Peace Conference) is accompanied by a series of narrative podcasts. 

In the manner of a Homeric Odyssey, Mélodie Lasselin and Simon Capelle travelled to the Balkans in the summer of 2022 to meet those who have been working for thirty years to rebuild the bonds of peace between communities: Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia. This research work was made possible with the support of the partnership between the Institut français and the Hauts-de-France Region and the partnership between the Institut français and the City of Lille. 

ENEMY (a Peace Conference) is a choreographic and performance piece for two dancers, Mélodie Lasselin and Léa Pérat, trained together at the Ballet du Nord School in Roubaix. They conceive a dialogue with local communities through dance, offering a hybrid narrative that mixes tradition and the future, heritage and fiction, advocating diversity as a bridge between peoples. This creation emerged as part of the Stronger Peripheries - Creative Europe programme following residencies in France and Italy. 

The European tour of this production in 2023 is supported by the Institut français and the European Metropolis of Lille, as part of their joint priority to strengthen links between the countries of the European Union.