Since its creation, the Compagnie Dérézo unfolds uncanny intervention tools and an artistic melting pot. Our shows explore poetics, fairgrounds, the brief form as much as the performance, music, masks or street art. We are not interested in borders. The people are different, and so are the playground architectures.
Which brings us to make our own forms of representation, with their singular relation with the text, speech, space and bodies.
As we refuse to quit from our civic responsability, we perform a theatre of art and public service, within the City.
To do so, Dérézo wished to distinguish itself from the sociocultural touting and from the subsistance and oppresion commercial strategies. We revendicate the possibility of sharing ideas, mystery and poetry in a rightful artistic theatre. And this, outside the elitist cultural habits that rule today. The stage must remain the space where one sharpens his/her critical mind, where we are put to face what we cannot understand.
Big citizenship issues have initiated some of our creations. For example: "What is laicity?", or "What place does the artist have in a contemporary city?", or even "What do we learn from machines, and in return, what do machines learn from us?".
Living authors’s writings can testify of that research.
Because it is the space of the people, of the citizen, of the horde; theatre (in whichever from) must be a political space. With the underlying of the relationship between the power in place and this population. Implying a sensitive relation, so an aesthetic relation, that each will have with the spectacular form that we offer.
There is an inherent violence to the theatrical act, a chosen violence, almost mandatory, that is rarely spoken of: what our theatre sets in motion can only be set in motion by it and can be lost at any time. And this is precisely what creates the conditions of that violence.
The opposite of violence is not gentleness; it’s the thinking process.
We have decided that our theatre does not comply neither within the entertainment business, nor in its insiduous derivatives. And our responsability doesn’t deny anyone the will to party, the sense of pleasure or humor. There is a sick theatre because it doesn’t shake anything, doesn’t even wave a flag for mindset. It calls itself entertainment and apolitical, but it’s an open space for oppression under the false relaxing pleasure of not making one think. And at its oposite exists another alienated theatre that wishes to think only through ideologies; and as such it can’t be played because it is already being played.
Lets say we try to dis-play. A show is an offer, a proposition.
The spectator, by watching, is active: he’s receiving. And receiving is a powerful activity.
It emerges as an answer to the irrational load underlied in a show. An answer to such use of forms, signs, and to the languages produced for the the hearing of another. Too often reduced to whom must be passively maleable, he must also take action in that transformation. To become his own poem beyond the theatre itself. He is the author of that process, the writer of that poem.
His emancipation relies on going from one poem to another: a sport that will lead him from his world to the world. And reality must be ready for him, because it is then only the world transformed by our presence in him. What the spectator receives he can transform.
If he doesn’t transform anything, then it’s mere consumerism.
What spectators are we?