Christophe Rulhes & Julien Cassier

Christophe Rulhes

He conceives, writes and stages GdRA's theatre. He supervises the investigation and interviews carried out by the company. On stage, he plays music, acts and dances. Rulhes was born in 1975 into an Occitan farming family. He began singing and playing music as a child. In the 90s, he got a degree in communication, sociology and anthropology from EHESS-Paris and was a student-researcher at CAS-LISST laboratory (Toulouse). He played music in concerts, shows, dance performances, and for television and documentary films, in France and abroad. In the 2000s, he had many interdisciplinary artistic experiences mixing music with writing, scenography, movement, visual and sound design, staging, and the humanities. In 2005, he co-founded the GdRA with Julien Cassier.
Since 2007 and Singularités ordinaires, the company's first show, Rulhes' work has been questioning how arts and the humanities may hang together and give birth to a plural theatre that would be both physical and narrative. Christophe Rulhes’ writings are based on the public sphere and investigation of recurring themes: the person's frailties and abilities, flamboyance of the ordinary, invention of daily life, narrative identity, singularity, ecology of practices, environmental issues, collection of words considered as minor or barely audible. For a free and playful theatre of the humanities, addressed to everyone and deeply rooted in the present.

Julien Cassier

He creates the GdRA's choreographies and scenographies and supervises the collective's investigation. He also participates in the conception and staging of the shows. He acts, does acrobatics and vaulting; he dances as well.

Cassier was born in 1978 and thanks to an early circus artist background, was later admitted to the Centre National des Arts du Cirque which he left in 2001 as an acrobat and vaulter. He then worked with several collectives that combined circus art, dance, music, theatre/text: La Tribu Iota, Anomalie, Baro d’Evel, La Clique, or la Compagnie 111 for which he created Plus ou moins l’infini.

He is the co-founder of the GdRA (2005), the other one being Christophe Rulhes with whom he shares the conception of the plays while fully organising their implementations. He explores dance, movement, image, sound and acting and devises various apparatuses and scenographies which he then puts to test on stage. His research focuses on corporeality and more precisely on the transparency of physical involvement where the body is guided by action. Some of his choreographies are more restrained thanks to sound and speech, which contrasts with his vision of the immediacy of movement. But they are just as brimful, physically speaking. On stage, he either dances on firm ground or on a trampoline.