Creation, Performance and Learning
Art is always in crisis and constantly called into question. Society, human beings actually watch themselves, question themselves, redefine themselves unceasingly on the biological, psychological, social, ideological and spiritual planes.
Art is built on the need for a constant calling into question of its deepest certainties. Such a requirement is coupled with an even greater necessity for learning a sense of inner security, self confidence in the face of any difficulty, without which neither creation nor performance can be brought to full term.
We expect artists as part of human society to be masters of a sound and impeccable technique, adaptable to every request, and at the same time to develop their own style; that they stay in line and still cultivate their originality.
Yet art is neither conformist nor adaptable. The practice of art is a perpetual apprenticeship that goes hand in hand with creation and freedom, from which springs the particular difficulty of the actor to assume his/her identity and responsibility as artist. This means reconciling in oneself the anarchist and the model citizen, the creator and the instrument, the favoured subject and the object of the performance. And each time, the duality of the actor and the increasing theatrical importance of conflict, tension and contradiction are underlined. Duality and contradiction: art of presence and action, in theatre?
The necessity for questioning and for a real inner security; technical mastery and development of a unique style; freedom and constraint are paradoxes experienced daily that can only find and create sense in art through the development and the activating of an awareness, which is nothing more than that of a body in movement in space and in relation to its environment. Can thinking be freed of its old ways? And can art witness an eventual change of paradigm?
In art, awareness is what allows the exploration of what is outside the usual, the passage from known to unknown – to make one’s own, to name untapped territory. For actors, this territory is, first of all, themselves as human beings and as incarnations of an art that is a thousand years old. Work dealing with the awareness of the body in movement in the theatre can go much farther than the elaboration of a theatre that is gestural.
It is an opportunity for acquiring both the sense of the present and that of tradition. Through this research, the actors, heirs to a past that lives within them, can become the founders of the future of their intuition. Their quest for the absolute can lead them once again to surpass themselves: to be utterly akin to one another in their authenticity and to be part of the human community.

Concerning the integration of somatic education and stage work

• Movement is life (Moshe Feldenkrais) Dare to return to oneself
• Learning freedom
• What makes us human: feeling, imagining, thinking, acting
• Our relationship to gravity
• Emotions and intentions at the heart of movement
• Dare to move toward the other
• The body, metaphor for the spirit? The spirit, metaphor for the body?
• Emotions and intentions at the heart of movement
• Dare to move toward the other
• The body, metaphor for the spirit? The spirit, metaphor for the body?

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