Our company works with animals, men, women, children. All these personalities work together, their performance creating and inventing music, acrobatics, songs, and dances, around and along with this animal presence.
This joint synergy raises new artistic and human bridges. Thus, in our shows, the animal has a guiding, observing and questioning role. The animals of our company are not merely there because we wanted to include them. They are a real part of our Tale.
We constantly try to get rid of clichés, to lay new eyes on life. The animals of the Baro d’evel company are real creative partners, we do not put them on the stage as human helpers, we put them on stage for what they are.
To work, play, invent, and create with animals is mainly to live with them and explore new relationships. They help us develop a more sensitive perception of the world.
Our artistic approach is inspired by this everyday life at their side. Their behaviour on stage naturally flows from their personalities, their affinities with each other, and the relationship with each artist. We create poetic forms exploring the themes of identity, otherness, bonding and life. For me, to share the stage with animals is literally to reconnect with what it means to “act”. They allow for artists and spectators to be carried in the moment. By their side, we must try to be real, to sincerely own our emotions, to be in the rightness of the moment, in a delicate mixture of control and abandonment.
My choice to introduce animals into the company’s project was not done lightly, because I know very well since I was a child that it implies an everyday commitment of every day, and over the long term. Being able to dialogue and bond with each one of them requires a deep investment.
The arrival of an animal in the company follows a real adoption process, that’s why we have few of them.
In our shows, horses and birds are free, each scene where they intervene leaves room for improvisation. We do not use methods or would aim to program the animals and make them comply to orders like automatons. Instead, we seek to invent a new shared language, so as to be able to communicate on stage with our bodies and voices.
In my opinion, working with an animal is finding a way to communicate and engage physically together, it is above all a matter of complicity and relationship building.
It is a question of knowing how to adapt to each other, to reinvent education patterns, to recognize the other’s signals, to know how to connect with their feelings, to respect their physiological and psychological limits, to allow them to evolve, to feel linked.
The animals of the company are like “transmitters’”, they help us highlight the bonds between what’s human and what’s animal, and to reveal the sometimes unexplainable. This allows us to reconnect the viewer with his own animalistic, wild nature, which plays a beneficial role on the audience’s view of his own condition as a man, and that of animals.
For me, creating spaces where humans and animals are partners is part of a possible solutions in a world in loss of direction.
Camille Decourtye, May 2018
Photos: François Passerini / Cockatiels: Fanny Thollot / Gus, pied crow: Blaï Mateu Trias