Artist statement
I come from two different origins: studies that brought me from the Ecole Normale Supérieure to teach theater at the University as a senior lecturer and direct PHD theses; and studies as an actress and director with Daniel Mesguich, Antoine Vitez, Philippe Adrien, Carlo Boso, the Colombaïoni, and Jacques Lecoq.
The two branches met quite naturally as I decided to work at the University in “Recherche-Création” (Practical Research). My theater, that I can define as an artistic gesture through all the plays I directed (more than fourty), is following different main axes, which I had the opportunity to develop with my theater company. My theater company, created in 198, is composed of a team mixing actors, playwrights, musicians, clowns, set designers, costumers…
In my work as a stage director and a company manager, I fight for:
– A civic theater that takes a look, through contemporary authors and classics, at major ethical questions which continue to cross our modernity as identity, responsability, guilt, exclusion (Kafka Dances, The Man in the Attic, The Bourgeois Gentilhomme, etc.)
– A theater that questions young audiences without any difference with “regular” audiences, by defending free access to literary heritage and great mythological figures (Quixote, Scrooge, Alice, Gargantua, etc.), and by working on adaptation and rewriting.
– A theater Everywhere and for Everyone, which explores societal themes via specific orders to playwrights for our ‘Theatre Umbrellas’, designed by a visual artist. Under these Umbrellas, the actors play unusual and playful monologues in several places in the city. They tour all over France very regularly (at least one or two Patrols of three Umbrellas per month).
– An appetite for workshops and theatrical events before or after the performances, in order to associate the amateur gesture with the professional gesture.
– A team which defends the diversity of our proposals and fights for a theater repertoire that runs for several years, with an average of one hundred performances per show.
– A residence work in different suburbs or countries, which mix creation and theatrical events with and for the people (up to New Caledonia).
– A national presence which is developing through loyal partnerships lasting for years.
– An aesthetic developed around the grotesque, with a specific work on masks and puppets
– A deep work on the relationship between music and theater, that brought me to direct operas, cabaret, choruses… and also to insert music inside theatrical texts, as I recently did with Boxing Shadows.
– A great loyalty to my actors (working from a play to another) but also to my playwrights like Timothy Daly, an australian playwright, whose 4 plays I directed (two of which he wrote for me); or Mohamed Kacimi, who writes plays and monologs for our Umbrellas…
As I always believed that theater can change world, I think it should take place Everywhere and for Everybody. My brechtian tendancy is that I always work on laughter to approach tragic things or historical periods. Since the first confinement, the whole company decided to continue working. So with one of our writers I invented the “Escape Theater”, about which I wrote a lot of articles and communications. It helps developing new ways of touching people who ignore what theater is – and what theater could be: a window opening on the world (teatron). In these plays, actors play live on zoom in front of the spectators who paticipate. Our Escapes continue to run everywhere: universities, companies, libraries, cities etc… That is the way I have always done things (I began to direct and play a lot of “flat’s theater”- theater in apartements): imagine theater in the streets. Not street’s theater, but a mobile, itinerant theatre that surprises you in all imaginable or non imaginable places.