by Baro d’evel and Barbara Métais-Chastanier
With words by Frederic Amat, Bonnefrite, Maria Muñoz and Pep Ramis

Available online and after our performances on tour from February 2022

For almost 20 years now, Baro d’evel has been tracing a singular path in contemporary stage writing, carried along by a tribe of humans and animals with whom they devise poetic and insistent shows. Transforming the approach to contemporary circus, Baro d’evel’s creations have left their mark on European stages by inventing a hybrid language, interweaving universes and sharpening contrasts. Combining acrobatics, movement, choreography and work on voice, material and music, Baro d’evel’s creations take place in the big top, the public space and the black boxes of the theaters. However, the same question resonates and unfolds in the performance, the dialogue and the emotion.

Less to close the story than to continue to write it, to draw the yet vivid lines and to let the future steps resonate, it is a question of seizing the opportunity of Baro d’evel’s anniversary to fan the flames of future desires. Consisting of interviews and texts written in dialogue with Barbara Métais-Chastanier, this book looks back at the different works that have marked the history of Baro d’evel. Enriched with photos and documents, it allows us to share the invention of a writing method, the twofold process of creation, the transition from desire to realization and the fundamental obsessions that drive Camille Decourtye and Blaï Mateu Trias.

It is a perilous gesture, however, to summon language, especially to make a book, when everything in Baro’s work seeks to overflow it, to make it vibrate on other intensities, to stand up to it from its limits. One runs the risk of stabilizing what should not be stabilized, of creating continuities that exist only by being in rebound or in rupture. One runs the risk of precipitating the meaning, where it exists only in the movement of a gesture in searching. So rather than writing about – which would be an attempt to lay down an external narrative – we decided to write from, write from Baro d’evel, from the troupe, from the big top, from the circus and what goes beyond it, write from this present that is transforming and unsettling, write from encounters, from friendships and loves, from childhood, from Beauce and Catalonia, from Toulouse and la Cave where a place of shared creation is being invented, from the family, this great reinvented family. We dreamed of a book that would be fragile, indocile and tender. Like a sleight of hand with what the rhythm of the pages demands, we imagined a book that would know how to be, in its own language, in search of the enigmas that the plays pursue. A book also that does not believe too much in monumentality, memory or fixity. A nomadic book and a book of passage. “It will be necessary to make a transparent book.” That’s what Frederic Amat says when we meet him on this mild July afternoon. “A transparent book. A book that forgets itself as a book.”

Barbara Métais-Chastanier

Maria Muñoz: This place where we managed to go together is a taste and a love for the way to understand how images are created. How situations are embodied. Where poetry is housed.

Technical information

Dimensions: 24,5 x 24,5 cm
352 pages
45€

Cover on 170 g/m² matt coated paper, laminated on a 3mm cardboard panel.
Back cover on 160 gm Biotop paper, laminated on a 3mm cardboard panel.
Binding sewn with visible thread.
Sheets of natural raw paper 120 g/m2.
ISBN : 978-2-9581137-0-4

Photos on page: Pedro López / Marta Marcia Cardellach / François Passerini / Jordi Bover / Blaï Mateu Trias / Javier Ruiz Gómez
Drawings: Blaï Mateu Trias