Caroline BRETON et Charles CHEMIN
Stage directors & performers
Caroline Breton and Charles Chemin received a creative grant for their show Figures.
What is your artistic background ?
Caroline: I attended the ERACM school, where I met people with whom I wanted to build things as an actress. Then I looked for other approaches than theatrical forms, towards the performative arts and dance. Today I am creating my first piece as a choreographer, De Natura Rerum, and I am collaborating with Charles Chemin, with whom I share a taste for abstraction and a pleasure in form.
Charles: Like Caroline, I have oscillated between theater, dance, and the visual arts, as a performer and then as an assistant. I have collaborated with and learned from inspiring artists such as Meg Harper, Bob Wilson, Lucinda Childs, Andrei Bartenev, Laurie Anderson, Philippe Chemin, Philip Glass, Jonathan Meese, as well as working in French theater as an actor and dramaturge. I attach great importance to exchanges between artists, to the circulation of ideas and to the hybridization of forms, which has led me to create theatrical pieces in collaboration with visual artists, composers, performers and choreographers, in very different countries and aesthetic cultures.
How do you view your profession today ?
Charles: The feeling that it is constantly evolving, and in all directions, between the evolution of forms, modes of production, relationships with the public, with other arts, with the world. Faced with this, there is the desire to fully ‘taste’ the processes, to manage to make pieces exist at all costs, while not premeditating the results. And above all to avoid the confinement of ‘director’ or ‘choreographer’ roles. For example, Caroline and I create pieces between dance and theater, as figures with great fluidity, but she also collaborated on a sound piece that I had developed with the composer Dom Bouffard, and I will do the lighting for her piece De Natura Rerum.
Caroline: We are currently deprived of any relationship with the public. It is therefore a time of frustration but also of research, of fallow land, of great freedom and of awareness that our artistic professions are essential to make a society breathe.
Where do you see yourself in 5 years ? In 10 years ?
Caroline: To continue to invent spectacular spaces with artists who move me, surprise me and with whom I have a lot of luck and joy to work with. And maybe one day, to be the origin of a space in which we can all meet to create and share.
Charles: To be surprised by what we will do!
Interview conducted in 2021
Photography credit: Julia Grandperret