Christophe Huysman
Actor, director and author, Christophe Huysman places writing at the centre of his work. Each new play is the occasion for him to let the voice of the poet be heard, the poet who enables reality, by transposing it, to be even more perceptible. To do so, he surrounds himself with a host of collaborators with whom he makes his way to renew the forms of a theatre that is "always in gestation". Circus artists, video-makers, dancers and musicians are thus invited to share the research of the company, Les Hommes penchés, and the Laboratoire mobile that he created. From the multimedia performance to circus shows, from the song recital to sound plays, they invent, together, works on the borders of traditional frameworks, all the better to turn them upside-down. Through bits and pieces, they compose surprising itineraries, all suspension and sensitivity, that asserting loud and clear that theatre space is above all a space of bodies. Bodies that are present or in images, tense, passionate, crossing the stage, gliding, leaping, assert that one has to "join forces", certain that in order to exist, to be present in the world, we must continue to imagine and dream. Because the very optimistic pessimism that envelops Christophe Huysman's writing and shows has only one aim: to invite readers and spectators to resist the desperation that our times of crisis tend to impose. His work could be discovered at the Festival in 2001 with The Toppled Men, in 2002 with This Man Whose Name is HYC and in 2006 with Human and The Race to Disaster.
JFP, April 2010