The body versus the buddy

(© M. Szypura)

The Compagnie Un loup pour l’homme is presenting its new show, Face Nord, at the Hallen van Schaarbeek/Halles de Schaerbeek. Performed by four individuals, this acrobatic movement theatre explores the limits of the body and looks at our relationships with the other.

Face Nord represents a continuation of Un loup pour l’homme’s investigation of acrobatic ensemble performance. Having successfully explored the duo in Appris par corps, the Compagnie’s creative partnership of Frédéric Arsenault and Alexandre Fray felt the need to develop this relationship and extend it to a larger group with a view to obtaining a glimpse of the relationship with the other: not with one single, but with several, others. That was the
starting point for this story of four bodies.

What exactly does Face Nord explore?
Alexandre Fray: There is no narrative thread: we raise questions about the liking for obstacles. These are people who subject themselves to ordeals and never cease doing so. For whom there is no limit. We raise questions about just what acrobatic movement theatre is. What does it tell us about ourselves? In the circus and among us acrobats, there is this taste for making things more complicated. Hence the title Face Nord (North Face): that option for what is difficult in order to feel alive.
Rather than just display virtuosity, the cast question it in order to reveal themselves. For us, the circus is more about action than representation. Another key aspect of the show is the attempt to recover the beginnings of the taste for acrobatics in the innocence of children’s play. What it relies on in the way of coordination, balance, relationships within a group, the partner-adversary relationship. We would like to reconcile the child and the adult in our adult future.
Is the corporal obstacle actually existential, relational?
Fray: Completely. Behind the physical struggle against gravity and one’s own body, what interests us is how one succeeds in being oneself with the other at the same time. How can one be an adult without losing the child? How can one go beyond the principle of victory? The circus looks at something that is not just the simple fact of winning. The process is more important than the result.
At the same time you are also pursuing a “grandmother” project. What is that about?
Fray: Since the company was founded we have only worked on male acrobatics. My next project is oriented towards women and in particular the figure of the grandmother. I am looking forward to working with women of different ages. To work on the connection between man and woman, via the physical relationship. What does it mean to carry a child? What is a grandmother? It is not simply an idea for a show, but also involves workshops and interventions in a hospital context and retirement homes. And photography and urban walks.
Where does that urge come from?
Fray: I once said, instinctively, in a workshop that I would like to carry a grandmother. I still have my two grandmothers; I am very attached to the rural world. There isn’t much thought given to the older public. It is very interesting in terms of what that tells us about the body, about the relationship to violence, about performing feats, dependency, intimacy, and risk-taking.

Face Nord
15 & 16/3 • 20.30, €12/17
Hallen van Schaarbeek/Halles de Schaerbeek Koninklijke Sint-Mariastraat 22A rue Royale Sainte-Marie, Schaarbeek/Schaerbeek, 02-218.21.07, info@halles.be, www.halles.be