François Verret
The unclassifiable François Verret who, since he founded his company in 1979, has travelled through the artistic landscape surrounded by musicians, dancers, actors, circus artists, visual artists and lighting designers to present plays in which experimentation and research hold an important place. Each of his collaborators shares his opinion and skill to create a theatre experience that constantly questions man, his present and his future, his contradictions, his desires and his excesses. Along with these stage partners, one must not forget the literary and scientific writings from which François Verret often took his inspiration and that were sometimes at the very origin of his projects. Kafka, Musil, Melville and Faulkner hold a very important place in the development of his work, in which the private and the collective, the societal and the political are called into question. This confrontation reveals the tragic dimension of the human condition, but also the humour and derision in the behaviour of men in tune with their destiny. For François Verret, the stage is the venue for fiction par excellence, the place where a creation process in motion can unfold. A place that he transforms into a space populated by strange figures, but also by mysterious machines and mobile structures. What he proposes to the spectators always offers several levels of reading and meaning, thus rejecting the idea of a single and restraining message. It was with Sans retour, a show inspired by Moby Dick, that the public discovered François Verret's work at the Festival d'Avignon in 2006.
JFP, May, 2011