Get stuffed

With Sophie Lenoir, Sophie Perez, Stéphane Roger et 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!’

La Compagnie du Zerep

Curated by La Compagnie du Zerep for the prefiguration of KANAL - Centre Pompidou. This performance takes place in a programme stretching over three weekends that features La Compagnie du Zerep and guest artists, conceived by Sophie Perez and Xavier Boussiron. The performances will be presented at two sites on the exhibition trail: the theatrino-sculpture ‘Boboourg-la-reine’ (‘Queen Boboourg’) and the installation-set ‘La pierre à Magritte’ (‘The Magritte Stone’).

Since its conception in 2009, ‘Beaubourg-la-Reine’ (‘Queen Beaubourg’) has been a theatre, a kind of multipurpose hall (in the noble sense of the term); and also a sculpture that recalls the early-twentieth-century architecture when the shoemaker used to live in cowboy boot-shaped house and the sandwich-seller in a hot-dog-shaped joint. ‘Beaubourg-la-Reine’ is a Circle (as are still to be found in Spain) whose objective is to recall the notions that are dear to us: an elementary taste for blasphemy, sporty excentricity, the propaganda of originality and of entertainment, a confined aesthetic, folklore, corniness, racial degeneration, the private joke, the plodding 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 that is open to guests – guests who act as a source of both admiration and inspiration. And in an age when it is easier to get along with overvalued objects and with wise or dead artists, we ensure that the human presence and its expressiveness exceed the safe value of a ‘work of art’. All this under the not-always-benevolent figure of the big-nosed commander.