Bruno Meyssat
Bruno Meyssat likes to travel. Through the texts he stages, the forms he proposes, the subjects he tackles, the countries he crosses for his shows and the teaching he offers: Kenya, Egypt, Mali, Peru, Japan. Taking inspiration from the most concrete facts and events, but digging a theatrical furrow far from the figurative, playing with images as well as enigmas in the company that he founded in 1981, Théâtres du Shaman, he now deals with themes involving history and current events. With an insatiable curiosity for everything that can create theatre, he goes through varied worlds, unfailingly peopled with objects, photos, sounds and materials, even if it is clearly the actors who reveal the buried potential and possible fictions in them. The text is only one of the elements in the construction of his projects with their always surprising titles: Detention, Night Rounds, Is It True that I'm Leaving?, From the Sky, Session, Observer, The Outer World... If Bruno Meyssat has travel companions like Sophocles, Strindberg, Beckett and August Stramm, he has always wanted to break with narration to write a theatre “outside texts”, which is never deprived of words but which modifies traditional performance codes. His theatre thinks and is thought out, preferring to uncover rather than to hold forth. It requires that the spectator take a curious look at it, calls on his intelligence and sensitivity, leaving him free to interpret what is offered to him. Bruno Meyssat presented Ajax, Son of Telamon in 1990 and Passacaille in 1992 at the Festival d'Avignon.
JFP, April, 2012