A Festive Spirit

We see art as a pretext for community, more than a means to an end. We are inspired by the rituals of traditional societies and how they resonate in public spaces. We create places of conviviality and citizenship, and see our performances as celebrations where excess, pleasure and collective work meet, where both the individual and the group are taken into consideration. We offer the spectator a dreamlike immersion into our world, somewhere between the sacred and the profane, reality and fiction.

City spirits

We cross the mental and physical limits of the city, widen the stage, push on further into the margins. We seize the landscape, seize public spaces or those yet to appear, as new surfaces to explore. We open up new paths. We experience the city by testing its possibilities and limits. We create with people, trusting them, revealing their “fragile and explosive” creative power.
We constantly question our methods in a permanent dialogue between the urban and the social.

“Rara Woulib explores the margins, places that theatre is not used to going.” Libération – September 2013

Pirates

At the beginning of the 2010s, we took to the streets of Marseille inviting audiences to night walkabouts around the city, theatrical free parties where we closed avenues to traffic, reopened parks, monuments and other places usually off-limits to the public. It is here that we first developed our unique approach and creative techniques based on autonomy and working within the margins. Theatre professionals welcomed our work warmly, and the rumours of our shows ran across Europe… Today, we stay true to our roots. In every new place we work with organisers to push back the limits of what (and where) is allowed.
For some years now, public spaces for performance have been reduced to the notion of ‘events’ and have been subject to restrictive security measures which very often distort the forms and the intentions of an artistic work. Our company tries to avoid the normalisation of artistic forms and strives to deform the legal framework by seizing existing situations and different human systems in place. We use problems and flaws as pathways, as gaps through which we can create places of possibility. We play with the obstacles in our way. We are inspired by the terminology of hackers and apply it to our use of public space.

“Hacking is not negative, it is above all having an inquisitive mind, trying things out, digging into the bowels of a system, diverting it from its main use and reappropriating it without ever destroying anything.”The hacker: an activist with a taste for a challenge. – Antoine Larribeau