THE BAR BOYS
THE BAR BOYS by Compagnie OFF Concept
Buffet show.
In collaboration with your caterer, Les Garçons de Café de la Compagnie Off will provide you with a five-star service, from the welcome cocktail to the dance floor, thanks to a succession of artistic tableaux that will give your menu an unforgettable flavour.
Dancers, musicians, circus performers, actors and technicians make up the team of a dozen or so interpretive waiters who will accompany you throughout dinner. A gradual immersion into the offbeat world of Compagnie Off for an evening out of the ordinary at Point H^ut - a venue for urban creation.
Sample programme :
Musical welcome for guests :
- Aperitif : festive, circular and mobile bubble bar
- Interlude: the Sonata
A grand piano descends from the top of the Tower for a duet with a musical saw.
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Buffet dinner : spectacular entrance on a 12m long table
- 1st tableau: the Black of the Swans - dance and contortion duet with final flight.
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Resumption of the buffet :
- 2nd tableau: the Wings of Desire - choreographic duet between heaven and earth
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Dessert round:
- Interlude: Aqualand (to be confirmed) - Guests find themselves plunged to the bottom of the ocean thanks to effets of light and the appearance above their heads of aquatic characters (capillotracted mermaid, jellyfish, divers, fish).
- Dance-floor and beer bar
- final tableau: the Elephant
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Entrance of the company's emblematic Elephant to bring the dance floor to a festive and spectacular close.
BLITZ WITZ NACHT
BLITZ WITZ NACHT by the Compagnie OFF Concept
The all-nighter of artistic performances!
During this all-nighter, we invite the public to take part in unprecedented, evolving experiences, with each artist presenting a performance across all disciplines: dance, theater, music, video, visual arts, installations, culinary arts...
In this way, Compagnie Off invites artists to leave their studios and workshops for a risk-taking experience of expansion, suspension and impression, where the finality of the act remains less important than the creative proces
AQUALAND
AQUALAND - Création 2021 (During the BLITZ WITZ NACHT) by Compagnie OFF
AQUALAND is a site-specific creation designed to plunge the audience into the heart of the elementary water cycle.
Welcomed in an ice cathedral featuring the prototype of the latest addition to the company's whimsical bestiary, the polar bear, whose roars accompanied the melting of the pack ice, spectators suddenly found themselves at the bottom of the ocean, witnessing a whimsical ballet combining marine animals, mischievous divers and a caged mermaid (a capilotracted artist) , before finding themselves with their heads in the clouds to follow the allegorical ascent of a human being before the inevitable fall, perhaps indispensable to his rebirth. A sequence of three tableaux celebrating life while reminding us of its fragility.
The palace of discoveries (1993)
With Le Palais des Découvertes, compagnie Off plays with the delicate balance between normality and abnormality, using an initiatory situation: the Palais is a labyrinth. Discovery of oneself, of others, beyond one's own representations. Revisiting fairground theater, proposing a singular approach to the phenomenon shack. At the heart of the "Palais des découvertes", Compagnie Off turns the very notion of "curiosity" on its head: the roles of showman and showgirl are reversed.
The "freaks", here the owners of the funfair, invite the public to discover the body of the attraction: their own reflection. Oscillation between a jubilant game (face to face with distorting mirrors) and a certain disquiet. Eyes first uneasy, then amused, finally captivated. As the attraction progresses, barriers come down, and mutual taming begins. But too late! The audience is "thanked"! Joc, the little crystal man, is the showman and owner of the attraction. Rising from his hydraulic throne, he exclaims: "I fly... I fly, I'm the greatest in the world". On a pedestal, his wife, the "big cashier", sells the tickets: "Come on, my darlings, how about a trip into the fifth dimension? A trip to the center of life? "she says, thrusting her enormous breasts under the noses of the front row.
Their Siamese daughters, positioned at the entrance to the Palais, punch the first tickets in cadence. Inside, five zouaves bustle around the plastically perfect phenomenon, "the shame of the family": the Palais des Découvertes disturbs our perception of form... and substance.
Carmen street Opera (1999)
Opera is extravagance, mythical characters, a meeting of the arts, a quest for total art. And what about "street art"? Beyond being unidentified artistic objects in the open air, "La rue" tells its stories in a particular way. "The street" is a privileged encounter with an audience, the invention of original scenographic devices, a genetics where arts that are still unknown to each other cross paths. "La rue" is an opera, a culture that thrives on air and freedom. Just like Carmen.
In this open-air arena of metal, rust flower and cigar leaf, the spectator is one of many in the ring. He or she ‘s one of the real as well as random factors in the performance. The 360° configuration offers absolute freedom of interpretation.
He chooses his own points of view, his own scenario, and two spectators side by side don’t experience the same show. The tank is like a funfair centrifuge, making you dizzy. Silences are intense.
The sound of a bird, an ambulance, a horn, the everyday penetrates a certain beyond. The street is here, with the opera. The most popular of operas is returned to the people in a total rewriting of Bizet's work.
Carmen embodies the history of the world, the duel between love and hate at the origin of the comedy of life. Here, the stage is a steel arena in which sixteen actors and singers take to the stage. The drama is played out in the pit, where the audience is compressed, jostled and overwhelmed.
Rustle of brass instruments, whistle of harp. A dazzling Carmen. The audience is warned. This Carmen is likely to overwhelm them. Carmen is bubbling, creating such electric tension that everything fuses together through friction.
The arena becomes an organic centrifuge where Carmen and the audience dance to the death. The arena becomes a circus. Flesh against flesh, the audience mingles with the dust, shivers to the rhythm of the instruments and is intoxicated by the scents of Andalusia.
Go give the fishes the idea of what water is (2003)
This new artistic challenge involves writing a score, a libretto and a major scenographic device, and bringing together the worlds of circus and opera.
It all begins with an admission of failure.
« The taxman brays, the coffers are empty, love yawns, my purses are full, I have a breakdown, I'm damaged, I don't feel like it anymore, my soul is on the streets, its pimp is called boredom, I'm fed up, everything has a price, even sleep, the world is a purse, my wife's leaving, my nimbus is in hock, creation is a diadem made of filth and illusion, a sceptre made of problems and sacrifices with a blow from a Remington, I'd throw my sky-less abysses and my nameless deliriums on the ceiling, I'd blow up the records room! »
Smells, neuroses, rages, overflows, exaltations, sweats, gasps and fantasies accumulate throughout this existential drama.
Go give the fish an idea of what water is or the impossible gamble of an infinite quest for life. The whirlwind has begun and will never stop. Nothing's going to stop. Make your I's.
Parables (2007)
6 giant parabolas suspended in the city, the medium for an unmistakable encounter between sound and image, the music of the stars in full recomposition and the lyrical voice of a soprano cloned to infinity..
The hydraulic arms of the elevators stretch skyward, carrying the parabolic discs to their listening position. On the elliptical screens of the parabolic discs, surreal visions of the universe's creations scroll, swirl, interfere and telescope. Pressurized smoke sometimes emanates from the overheated parabolic dishes, diffusing fragments of amplified images. We have to restore order to the chaos.
Listen to the infinitely distant to better perceive the infinitely close. When, finally satiated in their quest for celestial intoxication, the parabolas decide to look towards Earth, the singer, 7th planet, appears at the heart of this universe...
"A mechanical enchantment of enchanted parables. A fascinating monumental opera: the audience listens, watches, visibly captivated. A true creation." La Dépêche du Midi
Parables 2.0 (2010)
The mysteries of the infinitely distant magnetize the imagination in both fiction and reality. The cosmos has become a new terrain of possible projections for earthlings in search of meaning, looking for a habitable place to live while the earth is dying. In 2014 and 2015, Le Nouvel Obs ran the headline "Folie intersidérale" ("Intersidereal madness"). Real images captured live from space or inspired by fantasized intergalactic conquests invade our screens. Millions of people preferred to watch the landing of the Philae robot live, rather than flick through the usual live reality shows. Jean-Pierre Bibring (the robot's creator), with his Einstein-like face, drew admiration and awakened childhood dreams of becoming inventors, explorers, researchers and engineers, setting out to conquer other possible spaces.
Christopher Nolan's Interstellar was a huge box-office success, and 2015 saw a flurry of interstellar blockbusters, including J.J. Abrams' Star Wars VII, Ridley Scott's The Martian and a biopic of British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking. And in Germany, Z.A Architects is working on Martian dwellings dug into the basalt by robots.
What are we to make of this sudden frenzy for space? Is it the need to escape the dictates of instantaneity that drives us to place our hopes in the cosmos? Is it fear of the programmed destruction of our environment, or our apparent powerlessness in the face of the elements and the vast emptiness of our lives and goals, that leads us to turn to space and the astro-sciences? Or- is it that the truth lies elsewhere, and that we need to free ourselves from gravity and prepare for our imminent departures?
“... the desert dweller ... the solo flight enthusiast knows that to be on earth is to be under the gaze of the sky. There's no need to deify the stars to feel within ourselves this essential constraint to our earthly station, to our steps, to our disasters, to our sense of space in general, which is the celestial vault.”
Georges Didi - Huberman, on James Turell in "The Man Who Walked in Color". So, yes! Let's leave our earthly station, let's be inventors, let's be researchers on the alert, let's invent, let's post PARABOLE to capture the song and surface of the stars, and if we fail in the face of the laws of gravity and gravity, let's make sure we return from this journey to the heart of our celestial mechanisms with the ingenuity of a Bibring to answer this question:
Has listening to the infinitely distant helped us to better perceive the infinitely near?
Pagliacci ! (2011)
"Pagliacci! is an extreme reworking - albeit faithful in spirit - of Leoncavallo's opera. Under an unstructured big top, sweat and blood reign supreme at the heart of the eternal conflict that pits Man and Woman against each other to the extreme or brings them together to the point of fusion. Characteristic and sanguine, these characters, who live their daily lives in the material and the fragile, are loud, abrupt and exaggeratedly theatrical.
In a technicolour world borrowed from the fifties, most of the operatic beauty of "I Pagliacci" is highlighted by music with a contemporary sound. Fellinian onirism and Jodorowskian cruelty strongly influence the supervision of the whole and the surrealism of certain sequences. Between verismo and ultra-realism, the image is likely to shatter the screen...
Pagliacci squares the circle. Four characters at the heart of an eternal story, the perpetual cycle/circus of timeless passions:
Nedda / Colombine, the unfaithful woman with a divided heart
Canio / Paillasse, the deceived husband with a jealous temperament
Silvio / Harlequin, the irresistible lover with poisonous powers
Tonio / Taddeo, the spurned lover with a frustrated soul Four people flayed alive in the spiral of their heightened feelings...
"Slices of life served up bloody well (...) in a version of relentless intensity oscillating between 1950s ambience and Faustian madness. Superb!" L'Humanité
Wild Side Story (2016)
On the border between two cities, under a motorway bridge with its noisy, incessant traffic, lies a wasteland carved into the asphalt, a place of non-life bristling with concrete, a playground shared and fought over by two enemy clans. Capulet and Montague, senile and ridiculous old men, seem to have forgotten the origin of the conflict between them. The feud, muted when it comes to confronting a third authority, nevertheless persists among the younger generation, led by Tybalt and Mercutio, both quick to pick a fight. Only Doc, a dealer in pure oxygen, tries to calm their conflict. At a Capulet ball, Romeo, son of Montague, comes face to face with a strange and sublime creature. At first sight, a powerful desire draws them irresistibly together... Freely adapted from Romeo and Juliet, and superimposed on West Side Story, Wild Side Story highlights a tormented generation eager for thrills, and sets out to revive an impossible love, desperately trying to escape the fatality engendered by a vampirising and intolerant society. Compagnie Off revisits Shakespeare's timeless drama in an atypical, hostile urban setting. The scenographic context of Wild Side Story is based on the symbolism of a border between two territories that gradually merge. Designed for the street, this show allows the audience to move freely around a staging that gives pride of place to the original text, but also to contemporary dance car stunts and the Parkour of the tracers. Wild Side Story, a tragic, violent and sensual story, in the shadow of a bridge under which only the blood of sacrificed love flows.
THE TEAM
Philippe Freslon - Artistic Director
Caroline Forestier - Creative Assistant and Production Manager : c.forestier@compagnieoff.org
Carole Bonetti - Administrator : contact@compagnieoff.org
Diane Sagard - Distribution Manager : d.sagard@compagnieoff.org
Anne-Gaël Le Floch - Accountant
20 Rue des Grands Mortiers,
37700 Saint-Pierre-des-Corps
The Compagnie Off is a non-profit association (law 1901)
Board members:
Matthieu Thouvenin, President
François Vignale, Treasurer
Emmanuel Lecerf, Secretary
Compagnie Off is supported by the City of Tours, the Centre-Val de Loire Region, FONPEPS and ADAMI (France). OURS, banquise à la dérive/ Bear,banquise adrift ice floes receives creative support from Ateliers Frappaz. National Center of street performing arts in public spaces, Villeurbanne.