Artist statement
The GdRA (Christophe Rulhes & Julien Cassier) is often invited to provide a response to multi-lingual fields, areas, and contexts in the form of an original creation “for and from” the stage, as was the case in Madagascar (Merina land), South Africa (Cape Town, where the collective carried out the preparatory fieldwork for LENGA in the Bantu language of the Xhosas), Amazonia (Wayana land, French Guiana, for SELVE), and Japan (Tokushima Province, Shikoku Island, for “Yori Kuru Mono”).
Rulhes and Cassier aim to have the people they meet express themselves in their mother tongues, with a little help from translators sometimes. Body and choreography consequently prove to be two fundamental components of the symbolical, metaphorical, and physically-committed dances that can offer emotion all the necessary room words cannot provide.
Christophe Rulhes is an anthropologist (EHESS Alum.) and self-taught musician with a penchant for oral transmission. In the 2000s, he indulged in various interdisciplinary artistic experimentations: improvisation, writing, image and sound design, stage direction, and the humanities, to name but a few.
Julien Cassier holds a degree from the Centre National des Arts du Cirque (French National Center for Circus Arts). He has been experimenting with moves and motion ever since his early-childhood experience in a touring circus, and is always in search of new ways to explore and reveal the storytelling skills of the human body, of gym apparatuses, and scenography, as exemplified by his collaborations with Aurélien Bory, Baro d’Evel, and Anomalie Co.