Program

Five musicians traverse the city, preaching Virtue: smiles, balance, and moderation. But their well-oiled show derails, carried away by emotion and the unexpected. A mobile street orchestra blending operetta, chanson, and jazz-rock, with original texts and music.

Company Presentation
Founded in Burgundy in 2022, Cie La Vertu transforms the street into a stage and passers-by into accomplices. Blending music and poetry, it celebrates impulses, flaws, and the joy of being together through a generous, bold performance—where each show becomes a living celebration.

Five musicians traverse the city, preaching Virtue: smiles, balance, and moderation. But their well-oiled show derails, carried away by emotion and the unexpected. A mobile street orchestra blending operetta, chanson, and jazz-rock, with original texts and music.

Company Presentation
Founded in Burgundy in 2022, Cie La Vertu transforms the street into a stage and passers-by into accomplices. Blending music and poetry, it celebrates impulses, flaws, and the joy of being together through a generous, bold performance—where each show becomes a living celebration.

A single movement, a struggle, a dancing humanity. Prélude (out) emerges from a breath— the first cry, the vital impulse. Kader Attou revisits his own journey: his childhood in the suburbs of Lyon, the discovery of boxing, the beauty of gestures, Charlie Chaplin’s films, and the power of hip-hop as a space for emancipation. He explores the intimate connection between dance, music, and breath—the shared heartbeat that binds us all.

Set to the electro-acoustic music of Romain Dubois, the piece rises from silence to a crescendo of intensity, like a struggle to be fought to the end. The nine dancers embody a humanity in tension: physical confrontations, breaths, impulses, and resistances.

The choreography becomes a metaphor for struggle—physical, poetic, and fraternal.

Company Presentation
Kader Attou, dancer, choreographer, and artistic director of Cie Accrorap, is one of the leading figures of hip-hop dance. With a humanist and globally inspired artistic approach that blends influences and breaks down genre boundaries, Kader Attou has played a key role in transforming hip-hop into a new dance scene, giving rise to a distinctly French style of authorial dance.

Cie Accrorap is supported by the French Ministry of Culture and the DRAC Provence-AlpesCôte d’Azur. It receives funding from the City of Marseille, the Bouches-du-Rhône Department, and the Sud Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Region. The company is in residence at La Friche la Belle de Mai.

Stek oozes the street—its noise and its smoke. Through dance, theatre, stunts, music, acrobatics, juggling, bin manipulation, and clowning, Stek crafts a universe that could resemble a summer storm: refreshing and untamed. The performance speaks of the bond between four beings who value everything that creaks. It explores the inexhaustible poetry emerging from marginality, uncertainty, family, and precarity. It tells the story of four marginalised characters breathing in a skewed daily life, where life might be worth a piece of bread, and the hungry can become brothers in the struggle for survival. An artist-public meet-and-greet will follow the performance on Saturday 29 August at 8:15 PM, hosted by Laurence Méner.

Company Presentation Intrepidus Squad is a contemporary performance company founded in 2020 by Léo Morala (France), Ottavio Stazio (Italy), Mario Barragan (Mexico), and Analía Vincent (Uruguay). Their shared journey began during their school years and culminated in three years of professional training at the École Supérieure des Arts du Cirque de Toulouse Occitanie (ESACTO LIDO). Intrepidus Squad prioritises engagement with the public and the popularisation of culture. Beyond theatres, they thrive in public spaces, developing and championing a broad and authentic artistic vision. Their creative process always starts with the human relationships between the four members, their shared desire to express themselves together, and their commitment to connecting with audiences. To convey this human encounter, Intrepidus blends urban dance, circus, theatre, and music into a hybrid and sensitive language. At Intrepidus Squad, curiosity is the guiding spirit: they are at the beginning of their journey, and every artistic experience is long and complex. They remain eager to deepen their practice and discover new ways to create and elevate stories.

An artist-public meet-and-greet will follow the performance on Saturday 29 August at 8:15 PM, hosted by Laurence Méner.

Company Presentation
Intrepidus Squad is a contemporary performance company founded in 2020 by Léo Morala (France), Ottavio Stazio (Italy), Mario Barragan (Mexico), and Analía Vincent (Uruguay). Their shared journey began during their school years and culminated in three years of professional training at the École Supérieure des Arts du Cirque de Toulouse Occitanie (ESACTO LIDO). Intrepidus Squad prioritises engagement with the public and the popularisation of culture. Beyond theatres, they thrive in public spaces, developing and championing a broad and authentic artistic vision. Their creative process always starts with the human relationships between the four members, their shared desire to express themselves together, and their commitment to connecting with audiences. To convey this human encounter, Intrepidus blends urban dance, circus, theatre, and music into a hybrid and sensitive language. At Intrepidus Squad, curiosity is the guiding spirit: they are at the beginning of their journey, and every artistic experience is long and complex. They remain eager to deepen their practice and discover new ways to create and elevate stories.

Winner of the 2023 Beaumarchais-SACD Writing Grant. Supported by FoRTE, Île-de-France Region.
Co-productions:
● Le Plus Petit Cirque du Monde (Bagneux, 92)
● L’Azimut (Antony, 92)
● La Plateforme 2 (Pôles Cirque en Normandie – Cirque Théâtre d’Elbeuf)
● Pôle National Cirque (Elbeuf, 76)
● La Brèche, Pôle National Cirque (Cherbourg, 50)
● Le Carré Magique, Pôle National Cirque en Bretagne (Lannion, 22)
● Métis’Gwa (Les Abymes, Guadeloupe)

WANTED is a parody of the Western genre, entirely mimed and soundscored by a performer and a Foley artist. He is the voice; she is the body. Together, they play every character of the Wild West—from the prideful sheriff to the bloodthirsty bandit, the banker, the prisoner, and the femme fatale. With meticulous synchronisation, they poke fun at the clichés in cartoon fashion and tell, between the lines of the Western, another story: theirs—a little absurd, a touch tragic.

Company Presentation
Bruital Cie was formed in 2013 upon graduating from the Lassaâd School in Brussels. Specialising in noise mime and lip-sync, the company premiered WANTED in 2018—a multi-character Western parody that has since been performed over 300 times worldwide, primarily in outdoor settings. They have since adapted it into a quintet version, Wanted Live Band, featuring three musicians on stage, designed for both street and indoor venues. In parallel, they are developing their third production, Dark—a parody of the Middle Ages— maintaining the same humour and linguistic style as their previous works, but with... even more of everything.

Production: Bruital Cie
Created and performed by: Barnabé Gautier and Lorraine Brochet (alternating with Maximilien Neujahr and Gaëlle Amour, respectively)
Collaboration on writing and direction: Anne Bouchard External eye: Martin Votano
Technical team (rotating): Guillaume Souque, Stanley Simonson, Claire Péré, and Sophie Aptel
Administration and touring: Élise Wiart

Chain-link fences and barbed wire. Rusty corrugated iron on rooftops. Flags hanging limp. Feet striking the ground with force and elegance, heads held high, clothes in vivid, carefully tailored hues... This is the image of the Balata refugee camp in the West Bank. Unreal, absurd, and magical, it inspires this new creation. Immersive staging questions norms, the stage, and its audience. The momentum of traditional dances, with their concentric forms, shapes the scenography. Energy flows between periphery and centre. Embodying this collective force, movement becomes a projectile that denounces suffering and injustice.

An image suspended in longing so fierce it transcends reality... Mirage.

Company Presentation :
Driven by a sharp mind and a vision of society that is constantly questioned, this is how Cie Dyptik defines itself. It draws daily on encounters, exchanges, and current events that move it, crafting moments of reflection where the body is both interpreter and central piece of this introspection. The company’s creative red thread: a questioning of the individual’s and the collective’s position, illuminated by current affairs and the emotions it evokes.

Co-productions:
Cie Dyptik, HH Producties, CNAREP Atelier 231 / Sotteville-lès-Rouen, CNAREP Les Ateliers Frappaz / Villeurbanne, CNAREP Moulin Fondu – Cie Oposito / Garges-lèsGonesse, CNAREP Sur le Pont / La Rochelle, CCN de La Rochelle / Cie Accrorap, Les Tombées de la Nuit / Rennes, Théâtre de Cusset, Institut Français d’Algérie, Institut Français du Maroc.

Supported by:
Domaine de Bayssan / Béziers, Centre Culturel du Château de Goutelas / Marcoux, Le Fil - SMAC de Saint-Étienne, the towns of Le Chambon-Feugerolles and Sorbiers.

This creation benefited from:
● “Écrire pour la rue” / SACD and Festival des 7 Collines (Saint-Étienne)
● “Aide Nationale à la création pour les arts de la rue” / DGCA

Cie Dyptik is:
● Supported by DRAC and Région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes
● Backed by the Département de la Loire and the Ville de Saint-Étienne
● An associate artist with IADU La Villette
● A national-interest-scene partner with Théâtre de Cusset / Scène conventionnée d’intérêt national for Circus Arts and Dance

How does one dance with words? This performance is a pas de deux between bodies and written text, between language and movement. The choreography pulses with physical presence, rhythms, and the beauty of language and gesture—poetic, comic, and absurd.
An artist-public meet-and-greet will follow the performance on Sunday 30 August at 11:00 AM, hosted by Laurence Méner.

Company Presentation :
Joshua Monten creates versatile performances suitable for both stage and street, appealing to broad audiences. His choreographic language combines athletic physicality, humour, musical imagination, and intense emotion.

Our language, the language of juggling movement, is rooted in the relationship between the body and juggling—and juggling and the body. It has a history, an emotion, a journey, a sensation tied to our complicity and our ever-evolving relationship. We seek, explore, and advance on this journey where bodies speak and respond to one another. Choreographed and playful, dreamlike, explosive, and repetitive, the movement carries and engages us physically until our bodies are exhausted... only to return to the essential, to almost nothing. Juggling is our outlet, an expression, a connection to what makes us exist, to what makes us vibrate. To feel alive and linked to others, against all odds.

Beyond physical expression, it’s a human relationship shaped and influenced by the other that unfolds in space. A poetic, sensitive universe brimming with humanity.

Company Presentation
Founded in 2016, the company is the fruit of a long-standing collaboration. Our connection has grown through numerous trips abroad, where we shared and developed our shared passion: juggling. Over the years, we have created various short and long-form performances across France, Europe, and South America.

Supported by:
● Inzinzac-Lochrist / L’Hermine, territorial dance venue, Sarzeau
● Golfe du Morbihan, Vannes Agglomération / Grain de Sel – Centre Culturel, Séné
● Le Carré Magique – Pôle National des Arts du Cirque, Lannion
● Centre Culturel Juliette Drouet – Fougères Agglomération
● Le Fourneau, Centre National des Arts de la Rue, Brest–Dinan
● La Cité du Cirque, Pôle Régional, Le Mans
● L’Asphodèle, Questembert Communauté
● Ploërmel Communauté
● Maison des Arts – Baud Communauté
● Transfert Pick Up Production, Rezé
● Maison des Arts, Théâtre des Miroirs, Cherbourg-en-Cotentin
● Ay Roop, territorial venue for Circus Arts, Rennes
● La Cascade, Pôle National des Arts du Cirque, Bourg-Saint-Andéol
● Le Channel, Scène Nationale, Calais ● Saison Culturelle Accès-Soir, regional venue Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Ville de Riom
● Association La Loggia, Rue des Arts, Moulin
● Zim Zam Cirque, Marseille
● Les Ateliers Frappaz, Villeurbanne

The principle is clear: by orchestrating “moments of intense incomprehension” in the streets, Lapin 34 seeks to counter the pressure of the world...
Inspired by Lewis Trondheim’s Imbroglio comic, Broglii unfolds in public space as a (not-so- )closed-door drama for three Machiavellian characters vying for power. Love, joy, anger, and betrayal unfold in styles ranging from cartoonish madness to vaudeville, the grandiloquence of Greek tragedy, and ultra-violent Tarantino-esque flair. Each time, it’s up to the audience to choose their preferred style—and to revel in the liberating joy of laughter in the face of the absurd.

Company Presentation
Lapin 34 champions access to the whimsical for all, everywhere, all the time—and preferably in all weathers. In a world under pressure, Lapin 34 advocates for moments of intense absence of understanding. Access to the absurd and the whimsical excuses the lack of justification. There’s no because—because there’s no Reason. Founded in 2015, the company launched its story with Broglii, a street performance since 2017. For its second production, ANTI, Lapin 34 explores the darker side of whimsy with the absurdity of wielding power

ANTI was brought to the streets with support from Club des Six and Atelier de Fabrique Artistique du Cher.
Creation grants:
● À la Rue Nevers
● Le Carroi - Menetou Salon
● Le Luisant - Germigny l’Exempt

Residency hosts:
● Le Grand R Cie des Quidams

Public Meet-the-Artist Sessions
Opportunities to engage directly with the artists and ask questions about their performances. These sessions are hosted by Laurence Méner.
Where? In front of each performance venue
When? Immediately after the shows