Life-Experience Experts

Telling about intimacies and environments, the GdRA draws on an “ecology of practices” tackling the contemporary issue of survival, where the artistic act must and can take the floor. The ensuing work may take various forms, depending on what it has to say: stage plays mostly, but also indoor/outdoor performances, installations in various places, stage-writing experiences with audience members, choir songs and live drawings, post-rock pieces for prosody and trampoline, digital creation and video devices, etc. Before the elaboration of these potential forms, the GdRA often meets with “life-experience experts”: mechanics, farmers, schizophrenics, a world-famous dancer, a traditional therapist, a retired wine grower, a psychiatrist, someone living in one of Marseille’s neighbourhoods, a traveller who has crossed many boarders… All these people have a story to tell, a testimony to offer and reveal skills and expertise that often remain invisible. The person, as the actor of their own emancipation, is at the core of the GdRA’s productions. Filmed witnesses or invited writer-performers (either professional or amateurs) are asked to find their own space of autonomy based on their skills, passions and disciplines. These artists and witnesses, who often belong to various artistic styles and come from different countries, thus manage to devise their own specific languages within the group or the creation-cum-testimony device. Asserting their singularities, they pave the way for genuine multidisciplinary exchanges and influence the writing and staging of the work in progress. It is in such an atmosphere of intense relationship that Christophe Rulhes and Julien Cassier pass their ideas on to the creation teams. Such an enhancement of singularity favours a form of staging in which the actors and witnesses’ freedom prevails thanks to the raw but committed presence of each person’s ordinariness more than to the character’s fictitiousness or the classic actor’s habits—i.e. the way heads are held and bows taken—even if it also means accepting the beauty and profusion of disorder. In short, anyone who is interested in the project can be part of the GdRA’s investigation corpus, feeding it with the narrative involvement of personal stories, and participate in plays, visual or action-art installations. Such is the vision of what an audience is Christophe Rulhes and Julien Cassier try and share: the audience considered as a consistent environment, to which anyone can contribute, everybody being part and parcel of this environment. This attitude clearly materialises in the Experts de la personne cycle. Commissioned by theatres, local governments and associations, Pôles Cirques (national centres for circus art) or street art centres, the GdRA wrote several portraits of people or neighbourhoods from well-defined territories such as cities or rural areas. This resulted in contextual works created after a few weeks in residency. Since 2007, a dozen of plays, devices, choreographies and installations have been created, the latest being VIFS, un musée de la personne (2013-2014).