This is the first chapter of a long journey.
Year after year renewing our agrounds, Morocco, Egypt, the occupied territories… we would like, with the only drama for viaticum, to tour the Mediterranean Sea. Creating, at each stop, a show with actors that we meet there .
The matter won't be cultural exchanges, are such exchanges only feasible? How can we forget the bitterness of the Syrian poet Mohamed Al-Maghut dead last year:
Ah
If we only could exchange homeland
As cavaliers in a nightclub
On the contrary we believe that a culture is always already worked from another one, and that what we call "culture" is perhaps a certain way for that work to occur… So the Mediterranean basin, with its turbulent history made of military or commercial conquests , is this immense forge where cultures are created, already intertwined with each other. That's why we can not believe in the slogans of a clash of civilizations. That is why, actors on both shores, we chose to do together theatre.
(Text taken from the programme of the Agadir french institute for the première of the spectacleUntil the snow falls, Biladi 2007)
The Project
The project Theatre around the Mediterranean, planned in the long run, assumes the framework of Mediterranean countries and their people.
Our goal is to stop nearly a year in some of these countries to create, every time, a show with young local actors around the question of their cultural identity. This show will be played first on the spot and then in France, but also in the previous corresponding stops of the project, so as to continue the work of the previous years.
Renewing the adventure every year, we hope one day to be able to close the loop on the Mediterranean Sea.
The first edition of the project was held in Morocco in 2006-2007. We created the show Until the Snow falls.
The second edition will be held in 2008-2009 in Egypt or Lebanon.
The Compagny
Created three years ago at the Dramatic Arts National Conservatory of Montpellier (ed. Ariel Garçia Valdes), the association is installed since July 2007 in Plaisians (a village of Drôme, on the outskirts of the Vaucluse ).
Resolutely looking to the international because of its associativ project, the association still remains keen on the territory of which it depends, offering quality performances, close to the people.
But this only seems possible by integrating our activities to the cultural local policies already in place on the territory. It is therefore a priority to urge our efforts to that direction for years to come.