Writing(s)

1/Theatre is not the antechamber of litterature.
2/It is not the autor who speaks, it’s the language.
3/The image we have of ourselves prevents us from seeing what we actually are.

The very question of writing in theatre quickly made us consider the fact that we were re-writers rather that authors; that we had no other option than re-writing what had been pre-written for us.

At the same time, we must play our shows in front of audiences, populations, people, even tribes. There is no coincidence in this choice of words. And we must give and adress them a spectacular object. They are the readers of those shows. They have to make some sense out of them. A sense which is longed for. So "it" can start to circulate between us. Each one becomes, in the margin, an author of something. Some thing as "our own poem".

When you do theatre, writing is a mandatory machinery.

Because it’s the mechanic of the author, of course, but also of the stage director, of the interpreter and performer, and of anyone who faces the stage as a space for signs, clues, symbols, significations, gestures or myths in movement. And in that way, there is an irrational charge when you handle those writings for the understanding of others.

For all those reasons it’s always been verified that it is more relevant to consider it as re-writing, at the heart of which Say and See battle fiercely.

Dérézo, since its begining, is very obstinate in turning the stage into a melting pot of questions for writers. There we talk tongues, languages and writings. But also semiotics, codes, arpegios, music sheets, styles, variations or contexts.

We have chosen to work with those who write today. That is to say those who, because they are alive, have a live look on the era and on who live it. And we have accepted that, first, the particularity of the text is that it is a writing with holes, and that the first operation is to transform it into a speech, to give it an oral form. And also, because we come in last, after everyone else, we are "dwarves on a giant’s shoulders". The patterns repeat themselves, and this repeatedness submits us. It’s our job, our task, to make it give birth to something new.

Collaborations and a mentoring network with authors’ writings have come to existence since the creation of the company: Stéphanie Tesson, Marie Dilasser, Christian Prigent, Roland Fichet, Gilles Aufray, Ricardo Montserrat, Paol Keineg, Alexandre Koutchevsky, Laurent Quinton, Lisa Lacombe, Marine Bachelot, Jan Fabre, Edward Bond, Juliette Pourquery de Boisserin, Nicolas Richard, Régis Jauffret, Charles Pennequin...

One cannot ever say it enough : "he who speaks lies". And stage idioms always maintain a priviledged relation towards the text, and thus towards the speech. It’s within that relation that a theatrality of transversality can occur. This is what structures the research and the performances of the company.

By working with artists from various and different disciplins, we must organize, give a rythm, musicalize, bring syntax to the performance in order for it to finally spit out its range of possibilities: the unspoken of a speech, but also its visions. As a collective.

Languages, writings, graphs, structures are then of all embodiments: voices, images, videos, plasticity, objects, sounds, physical, visual, luminosity, textually...