Zimmermann & De Perrot
After studying interior decorating in Switzerland and studies at the Centre national des Arts du cirque in Châlons-en-Champagne that attracted a great deal of attention (his class performed in The Cry of the Chameleon by Josef Nadj), Martin Zimmermann moved to Zurich. There he met a young self-taught DJ, a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts, who became involved in musical composition, Dimitri de Perrot. The two young men immediately became friends and collaborators. Curious about everything, they decided to join forces to invent shows in which they could "merge music, the circus, dance and visual arts". For a decade, from the turntable stage of Gaff Aff to the rocking stage of Öper Öpis, these craftsmen of genius have been sculpting a facetious and singular body of work. The very heart of their universe lies in the moving sets that they create and people with characters, often alone, who run into each other, have an exchange and separate without saying a word, expressing their feeling through their bodies alone. A language without words, meticulously organised, painstakingly put into images, a terribly inventive system, of a hair-raising speed that, from time to time, gives way to suspensions and periods of contemplation. This alternation of tones creates a poetic world, tinged with humour and sound discovery, a unique universe, which has emerged from the constant dialogue that Martin Zimmermann and Dimitri de Perrot maintain to move, understand the world that surrounds them and to offer a profoundly humanistic vision of it. For their first participation in the Festival d'Avignon, they are presenting a new work for them in which their characters speak and in which they are, themselves, absent from the stage. For Chouf Ouchouf they have agreed to direct the Groupe acrobatique de Tanger, 10 boys and two girls who decided to envisage, in a contemporary approach, the secular art they have inherited: traditional Moroccan acrobatics.
JFP, April 2010