Three evening performances: the Cie du Singe Debout at the Natural History Museum of Marseille – VIVANT Season

On September 9th, 10th and 11th, Jade & Cyril – Cie du Singe Debout invest the Natural History Museum of Marseille with 3 evening performances around the theme: “6th extinction: These Others, what do they have to tell us? In the rooms of the new permanent exhibition “Terre d’évolution”, the artists of the Cie du Singe Debout will propose a singular and original journey in the form of a joyful, serious and poetic bestiary on the theme of the 6th extinction of life and in echo to the collections.

The extinction of life questions our capacity to coexist with the biodiversity that is our foundation; it leads us to redefine the borders, to invent new forms of diplomacy with what, within us and outside us, does not want to be domesticated. The letter ” Message from the Others, sent from: the forest, the desert, the sea, the prairie ” by Paul Shepard, philosopher, will be the red thread of this journey conceived and performed by the Cie du Singe Debout.

In the rooms of the Museum of Natural History, she will evoke the 6th extinction in music, words, images and masks and our link to the living in metamorphoses through humanimals bodies.

Will we be left with only the ghosts of what we loved or feared from this world of the living? It is in a procession of ghostly animals (pangolin masks, golden eagle, polar bear and dragonfly) on the sound of the famous red list of endangered species, with clarinet and concert of bells, that we will be asked this question to us, “concerned living”.

For years, the company has been trying to bring out, through hybridity, the point of view of the other, the non-human, thus becoming a messenger of another relationship to the living.

Conception and direction : Jade Duviquet
With : Cyril Casmèze : actor, zoomorphic performer / Jean-François Hoel : musician, noisemaker / Sandra Abouav : dancer, zoomorphic performer / David Mornet : actor, performer / Jade Duviquet : actor, director
Assistant : David Mornet
Sound and music : Jean-Marc Istria and Jean-François Hoël
Costumes and masks: Jade Duviquet, Marie-Hélène Répetto and Isabelle Le Pors
Construction and lighting advice : Vincent Tudoce
Drawings : Anne Buxerolle

3 evening performances ” 6th extinction : These others, what do they have to tell us ?

September 9, 10, 11, 2021
Duration : 50 mn to 1 hour
Schedule: 6:30 pm and 8:30 pm
Free of charge, on reservation at 04 91 14 59 55

ABOUT THE NIGHT SAFARIS AT THE MARSEILLE MUSEUM

Launched at the beginning of the year 2000, under a new form, evenings called “Night Safaris” were organized by the Museum of Marseille in order to make the public discover its collections under the prism of artistic performances and the questioning, unceasingly renewed, of our relationship with the Living. They take place in the heart of the immense rooms of the permanent exhibition of the bicentennial establishment, in the middle of the naturalized animals and other specimens exposed: Giraffes, elephants, bears, thylacines, fishes, parrots, lions, fossils, skulls of hominids, sea urchins, insects and plants… wild species, endangered species, extinct species…

Initially proposed in the form of storytelling wanderings, by the light of flashlights, these evenings were a great success with the public. Over the course of the editions and the opportunities for artistic collaboration, other forms of representation have been experimented with. The tales have been joined by all the disciplines of live performance to create unusual performances and reach a different audience. In 2021, after more than two years of work and a complete redesign of the Museum’s exhibition spaces, the night safaris will unfold the geological time line up to the 6th extinction and question our ability to inhabit this biodiversity that we are weakening and which is nevertheless essential to us.

THE COMPANY OF THE STANDING MONKEY

Jade Duviquet and Cyril Casmèze mix their universes: she, theater and letters, he, geography and circus. From their common passion for animality and the living; she, raised in the countryside with animals; he, who has been an animal since childhood, they created the Compagnie du Singe Debout. For years, they have been exploring the porosity between human and non-human animals. They apply themselves to disturb the border built between the Man and the Animal to override a disastrous relationship with the living based on domination, domestication and oblivion. The body and the word are summoned and impoverished to make emerge what exceeds a conventional and tired reality. The embodiment of the animal through precise gestures allows us to decentralize our gaze and to reinterrogate our relationship with the living, to find a buried proximity.

The Company has the will toassociate different artistic mediums for multidisciplinary shows in theater where it works with artists (dancers, actors, musicians, visual artists) that it leads into the animality and its questioning on the Living. These are shows based on authors such as Franz Kafka, Edouard Levé, Elisabeth de Fontenay.

Jade and Cyril continue this research in performances around metamorphosis, hybridity and the cohabitation of the living. By investing urban places (bridges, public squares, museums, contemporary art centers) and so-called wild spaces (forests) in packs or alone, the Company creates a less vertical way of treading on what surrounds us: the renunciation of a constant bipedalism in an already humanized setting summons humility and gives rise to a form of de-hierarchized life.

For their shows and their research on animality and the living, they meet philosophers, scientists, historians and writers such as Vinciane Despret, Etienne Bimbenet, Pierre-Olivier Dittmar, Nastassja Martin, Anne de Malleray, Anne Simon. With these researchers in a common desire to transmit and thanks to their curiosity and their availability on stage, Jade & Cyril create then and develop since more than five years the concept of “skidding conferences”. To mix arts and sciences to decompartmentalize and put in movement the knowledge and to create the sensitive, the in situ and the immediate.

Image credits: poster © Cie du Singe Debout ; rehearsals of the Cie du Singe debout : les animaux fantômes ©David TELLO