The shows by your company, Baro d’evel, stand at the crossroads between the circus, where you come from, dance, singing, and performance. You transform the stage in full view of the audience, in a great movement of destruction and construction which also evokes plastic arts…
Blaï Mateu Trias: Our artistic work is reminiscent of cooking, of matter itself. Our shows are whole experiences. There isn’t a single axis.
Camille Decourtye: We do everything we can so that each spectator feels that they are a part of what’s about to happen. That’s the very meaning of the performing arts! In order to do that, we look for a rather subtle place of creation, which exists as soon as the audience enters the theatre. It’s a journey we experiment with during our creations.
Your name was originally Baro d’evel Cirk. As a circus company, you moved from the street to the tent, then to the stage. How do you feel about that evolution?
Camille Decourtye: Right from the start, we refused to justify ourselves through the question of a message, which is often a demand made by people who don’t create shows… We learned a lot from the way plastic artists, and painters in particular, speak about their work. You can find a lot of our process and obsessions in their words. We’ve stayed faithful to that way of looking at artistic work and explored our language. Our first material is the body. We start from it to go towards the music, the voices, the animals. There’s a form of dramaturgy which appears more clearly when you take a step back: it’s what allows us to keep going forward, show after show.
Blaï Mateu Trias: Our shows are in constant evolution. We understand them only when we stop doing them. We did start in the street, doing a lot of acrobatics, trying for different things. As for the notion of circus, it’s hard for us to speak about it in concrete terms. The same goes for theatre or dance! One thing is certain: we started young and went through all the states of the performing arts. At first we stood outside of the institutions, although now we generally perform in theatre venues. From the moment we started our training at the École nationale du cirque, ours wasn’t a reflexive art, but clowning and humour were already there.
Camille Decourtye: Our shows are inseparable from a relationship to the body, from a physical commitment. We come from a world, the circus, where one is responsible for one’s equipment, where you have to think about how you’re going to welcome the audience, pitch your tent, load and unload, deal with the constant travelling. There is a form of empowerment, of awareness of the whole. Those conditions forged the world of Baro d’evel. This way of creating and living is a continuation of all our projects.
How do you create your shows, with all their visual, sound, and performative surprises?
Camille Decourtye: We start from our intuitions and proceed through many improvisation sessions, which means long days of work! We try to create “tableaux,” so that the trace of the bodies are embodied in the space and take on an almost sacred dimension. With each performance, and in a different way every time, we open a channel that is larger than us. It’s about connecting to what transcends us, to the great whole, to the living. Our work with animals on stage, like our relationship to clowning, helps us to communicate this desire. We also collaborate with people from all kinds of backgrounds, who bring very powerful things to our shows. We try to avoid the obvious, the “de facto,” the “we are acrobats so we’ll be doing acrobatics.”
Blaï Mateu Trias: We try to make ourselves uncomfortable to create performance. This commitment to the space characterises us. It arises from the physical relationship between us.
The title, Qui som?, evokes a desire to create a community. Do you work with a troupe spirit?
Camille Decourtye: The space of creation is shrinking nowadays. There is a real malaise, even though in France the situation is at once fragile and exceptional. Qui som? asks a central question: who do we want to become? After a world in black and white, or in shades of grey—the world of our previous diptych, made up of Là and Falaise—we now have twelve artists on stage, accompanied by children of the company or invited for the show. We spent a long time working on the plasticity of the show, through the use of pottery—dry, raw, or baked—the sudden use of colour, and the use of many objects in unexpected ways.
Blaï Mateu Trias: This show is a continuation of our desire to position ourselves in everything we do. It is in those imperfections, irregularities, singularities, and metamorphoses that we found the place where we can perform and create, with a strong plastic dimension. To grow this community on stage, we invite artists from different disciplines, lead workshops and cook together, and travel to meet each other, so that the choice of who to keep by our side is based on real affinities, and also because a show like Qui som? means being on tour for several years. Choosing the colour of a show is to show the importance of an energy, and thereby the meaning we want to give to things. What matters in a show are its tipping points. That’s where the performing arts we love are located. The idea is to emerge from something that comes from the unexpected, from the visible as well as the immaterial, having grown in some way.
Qui som? tries to open pathways in an opaque world. In that sense, isn’t it a deeply critical or, even more so, political show?
Camille Decourtye: We ask ourselves, in our own way, if the world to come isn’t already in us, if something is happening in the way we are. We think we all have the power to act. Today, in our disembodied world, anyone can buy virtual sensations. As if it were about buying emotion on the back of capitalism. But when comes time to really do something, it’s no longer about buying. It’s about being brave and facing oneself. We’re convinced we can experience our need for joy, desire, laughter, levity, and intelligence through this form of action. This kind of research is the only way for us to escape a sort of foolish adolescence of humanity. Summoning a troupe makes sense in that regard. Not losing sight of the “how,” the attention to others: our work starts from there. We are layers of memory, aware of only a tiny part of what makes us. Working on tiredness, on the voice, on the body, helps to perceive the presence of another life, of other lives…
This conception of the immaterial or of the invisible testifies to the deep poetry you create on the stage…
Camille Decourtye: Qui som?, like Baro d’evel’s general project, takes place in the imagination. Poetry comes first: it structures our lives and our bodies. It’s the same for our dreams. We’re not trying to position ourselves. We’re not trying to tell a linear story. How can we hang on to meaning when our lives are a chaos of perpetual movement, improvised day after day?
Blaï Mateu Trias: Those notions of imperfection and doubt on stage also come from what Camille and I represent, the meeting of France and Catalonia. This meeting is accompanied by another, with our collaborators, that is, with other personalities, other stories, since our creations are based as much on our lives as on all our possibilities. Simply put, we try to sublimate what we try to be. We are neither purists nor soloists. We’re jacks-of-all-trades.
Camille Decourtye: Theatre should be an open house.
Interview conducted by Marc Blanchet (February 2024) and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach