Our Early Joys

The Collectif Petit Travers and The Debussy String Quartet plan to join forces in a full-length production, exploring the close links between the intimate and universal realms of their performers (musicians and jugglers) and the way in which these realms shape their relationship to the world. We will integrate each artist’s expression in a piece which will include intimate testimonies and diverse musical and choreographic languages. It will also be an opportunity for us to continue the stage work that we began more than ten years ago with certain performers, as well as to enrich the company with new figures. After two individual artistic endeavors (the staging of Encore la vie, a piece for four jugglers and the ensemble TaCTuS, with director Nicolas Mathis, and the creation of S’assurer de ses propres murmures, a juggling duet with jazz drummer Pierre Pollet and artistic director Julien Clément), we are keen to discover the richness of working once again on a challenging collaborative artistic project.

We will work with 10 jugglers on stage, some with whom we have been working for 10 years, others whom we will meet for this project : Etienne Chauzy, Julien Clément, Rémi Darbois, Amélie Degrande, Bastien Dugas, Alexander Koblikov, Taichi Kotsuji, Carla Kühne, Emmanuel Ritoux, Anna Suraniti. In a break with certain of our previous works, we would above all like to consider the group as being made up of singular, unique artists, each having an original approach to their careers, their personal relationship to the stage and to their juggling practices.

A juggler works alone to invent his or her relationship to objects; juggling is a practice that develops singularities, each juggler inventing a unique way of using his or her body and its vocabulary, its touch of an object and its sequences, beyond the fashions and major trends that run through this art. Each juggler also has an original relationship to the daily practice -or not- of juggling. This practice can be experienced as a game, training as in a sport, a quest, or an aesthetic construction.

We want to collect the testimonies of each artist, the guiding thread being the «emancipation/alienation» movement found in any demanding practice which encroaches on personal life as much as it enriches it, which isolates as much as it allows us to reach out to others. We would like to create a series of portraits and then use them as scenic material for the piece, as common threads or zooms that focus on each artist, before they merge into large collective choreographies where the notions of shared time and space take precedence over individuality. We would like to observe the great back and forth movement that connects the group to the individual and each juggler to the group through the personal, intimate prism of self-development.