Jean-Paul Delore
It is in the LZD-Lézard Dramatique collective, founded in 1978 in Lyon, that Jean-Paul Delore began his career as author, director and actor. Becoming the artistic director of the company in 1997, he continued his work on the basis of multidisciplinary creations that often include the inhabitants of the cities where he works: athletes, young people in difficulty, secondary school students... Resolutely situated at the boundary between genres, his approach leads him to work in the proximity of contemporary musicians and composers, sketching, through his creations, the outlines of an original musical theatre, giving equal importance to words and musical notes. The year 1996 marked his meeting with Dieudonné Niangouna, with whom he has had particularly close ties, notably since the beginning of the Carnets Sud/Nord adventure. It was in 2002 that Jean-Paul Delore launched this major project, designed as a travelling laboratory of theatre and musical creations journeying from France to central and southern Africa and Brazil. From the human and artistic encounters that he had in Kinshasa, Brazzaville, Maputo, Johannesburg and Rio de Janeiro, many shows were born, among them Foreign Affairs, Maybe, Ilda and Nicole, or the show for the general public Ster City. Without Doubt, the play this artist-traveller is presenting this year at the Festival d'Avignon, brings together most of the artists who have participated in this cycle, crossing genres, forms and languages.
JFP, April 2013.