Recif

This Headline is not a metaphor. The type of stage this theatre group Les Passagers («passengers» from French) uses is presented as a vertical panel. Let’s imagine, for a while, that the ballet boards or a trampoline with acrobats has been tilted at an angle of 90 degrees, but actors, having ignored this fact, go on danc­ing; and they do not simplify anything; more over they manage to combine choreography with painting. Every performer of the group Les Passagers is at the same time an actor, an acrobat, a dancer, a painter and they create a unique «airy» spectacle full of circus risk and high-flown poesy. But what’s more, it is the process of creation, that becomes the subject of performance: a while vertical panel (read: boards) used as a white canvas of an artist, is being turned into a painting by the «passengers» before the spectators’ eyes. Pushing off the balancing point of support to go into soaring, the actors instantaneously manage putting some paint onto the canvas. The speed of the flight together with the rapidity of painting do not prevent every performer from being amasingly precise and coordinated in his movements to harmonize with each other. It takes just 30 minutes of the whole show to create the finale of the performance – a completed monumental mural.

Les Passagers theatre group appeared in 1988 on the initiative of a stage directorand choreographer Philippe Rion. Since that it has always been important for the company to assimilate into urban space to be able to create a miracle by means and resources of theatre. In the group’s repertoire there are such things as «Event … Sky», «Passagers», «Reef» (a free interpretation of the myth about Orpheus and Euridice), «Upwards» (Vers le Haut) staged for the Ruhr choreographic theatre in Essen (Germany) which is based on the site of former mines. In the year 2000 the theatre group enriched their playbill with a new performance based on the motifs of F. Fellini’s «And the Ship Goes ...», which was staged on board the ship. At the end of the year 2000, in Bologna, Les Passagers staged a happening which lasted forty-eight hours. The work by Italo Kalvino «Invisible Towns» served as a literary plot of this project.