Performance artist Jean-Daniel Broussé shares his bread and his story

In a show baked to perfection, Jean-Daniel Broussé narrates his uncommon journey from a bakery in the Béarn region to the world of circus and queer cabaret.

Broussé knows bread right down to the last crumb. From the crispness of its crust to the substantial lightness of its centre, the recipe for the perfect baguette, the Cyprien Baguette, had been passed down from father to son for four generations at the Broussé bakery in south-west France.

Rather than take over the family business, Jean-Daniel allowed himself to be guided by the siren calls of the artist’s life, which led him all the way to London. He could have played the baguette, but he preferred the flour of the National Centre for Circus Arts.

Knot, his first show, created with Nikki Rummer, involved dance and circus to untie the knots in which life encircles us. Hungry for the stage, he collaborated with numerous circus companies in France and the United Kingdom. In Marseille, he took his Shit Show out of the oven: a queer, trashy cabaret between art and improvisation where anything goes.

Sharing bread

After all these stage experiences, he let the dough rise on his first solo show, (Le/The) Pain, an intimate and captivating performance where he mixes circus, narrative, humour, performance, dance, and stand-up. And where he makes bread.

Dressed in an apron, Broussé, or JD to his friends, mixes his ingredients: 1kg of patriarchy, 750ml of Christian values, 70g of sentimentality, and 20g of parochialism. The making of bread becomes a metaphor for a life’s journey between risk and security, queerness and patriarchy, or gluten and acid reflux.

Without a net, he allows himself every detour, punctuating his story with acrobatics, video archives, and karaoke, and even a side-trip into the Occitan language, accompanied by the samponha, the bagpipes of Béarn.

Between humour and emotion, amidst the smell of hot bread, he speaks to us of transmission and rupture, of what we preserve and what we abandon, of what we manage to digest and what remains stuck in our throat. And as he is, above all, generous, he finishes by sharing the bread.