La Compagnie du Zerep
LA COMPAGNIE DU ZEREP
A project by La compagnie du Zerep initially created for the prefiguration of KANAL - Centre Pompidou and revived for the closing of this prefiguration. The performances will be presented at two places along the exhibition route: the theatre-sculpture ‘Boboourg-la-reine’, and the installation-decor ‘La pierre à Magritte’.
Since its conception in 2009, ‘Beaubourg-la-Reine’ has been a theatre, a kind of multipurpose room (in the noble sense of the term), and a sculpture that brings to mind the architecture of the early twentieth century that mimicked the business it housed: for instance, when a shoemaker worked out of a house shaped like a cowboy boot, or a hot-dog seller worked out of a joint shaped like a hot-dog. ‘Beaubourg-la-Reine’ is a Circle (as can still be found in Spain), where it is a matter of recalling the notions that are dear to us: an elementary taste for blatant blasphemy, sporting eccentricity, the propaganda of originality and entertainment, confined aesthetics, folklore, corniness, racial degeneration, private jokes, the industrious tradition and the cult of the moment …
But, between archival work and living documentation, ‘Boboourg-la-Reine’ is above all a play by La compagnie du Zerep open to guests. Guests who are sources of both admiration and inspiration. And in an age when it is more convenient to deal with overvalued objects and wise or dead artists, we ensure that the human presence and its power of expression exceed the sure value of a ‘work of art’. All this, under the not always benevolent eye of the big-nosed figure of the commander;
SEANCE DE NU D'APRES NATURE HUMAINE
15:00
In the great tradition of the academy, for those who might need to release some of the pressure of modernity. The actors pose for you, with musical accompaniment.
FAIRE METTRE
16:00
La Compagnie du Zerep with Sophie Lenoir, Sophie Perez, Stéphane Roger and Xavier Boussiron. There are other gestures too: cleaning out, cursing, intriguing, taking the piss, rotting, dying, the so-called Berlusconi gesture (fainting shamelessly), answering, giving it one’s all, squinting, grafting Isabelle, watching over Natacha, dosing somebody up, terrorizing, making somebody look stiff, blowing, dressing up like a dick, getting reconciled with life. As Samuel Beckett used to tell Buster Keaton (and as Patrice Chéreau told Jacqueline Maillan a few years later): ‘Stop gesticulating and turning over the masks to destroy a pipe while I grab hold of the gesture of making a call!
Y MANQUE PLUS QUE L'ORCHESTRE !
17:00
The idea is quite simple: my body advances like a mask, my body advances like a grimace. The action is unstoppable: to come back to life again and again, but never in the same way. Between spontaneous carnival and serial anti-catwalk. Even exhaustion cannot overcome it.
ÉCARTE LE GARDINE, TU VERRAS LE PROSCÉNIUM
18:00
La Compagnie du Zerep – Marie-Pierre Brébant, Xavier Boussiron and Fab Maria. The core members of Zerep: Sophie Lenoir, Gilles Gaston-Dreyfus, Stéphane Roger, Marlène Saldana. A performance somewhere between a photo-novel and a tableau vivant, between a Christmas manger and a wax museum, between an experimental farce and the laws of universal gravitation. Only the starting point always remains the same: two couples at a cocktail party.