Arcosm

Artictic Direction: Thomas Guerry, Camille Rocailleux

Creation: 2001

Founded in Lyon in 2001, Arcosm is co-directed by Thomas Guerry (dancer, choreographer and director) and Camille Rocailleux (percussionist, pianist and composer). The company has chosen as its main focus all forms of crossover and links between different disciplines and artistic vocabularies. It is based on the multiple ways music, song and dance can interlock. The voice, as material, rhythm, melody, timbre or texture, is an inseparable part of the musical world and adds colour, shape and theatricality to the characters. The specific skills and abilities of the performers are taken into account, but they are also invited to explore other less-familiar modes of expression. In this way, the experimentation spaces provoke new dynamics where extremely well-mastered techniques are to be found alongside precious and indispensible “fragilities”, which act as a kind of sensitive and emotional intrusion. Agitation, de-compartmentalisation: every enterprise founded based on curiosity allows apparently-distant fields of activity to be attained. So, we have no intention of suggesting a sharing of existing rules. We are coming with the ambition of constructing trajectories together which have no predetermined destination, strategies and bifurcations. We are building a set of stretches of road alongside the road, as a way of broadening the field of vision. Fragmented, fiery, audacious, serious or funny, the company’s shows reflect our everyday world, times in our lives that are sometimes chaotic, sometimes rebellious or madly euphoric, but always with emotions near the surface.

The piece “Echoa”, the company’s first creation (2001) in Angoulême for two dancers and two musicians, has been performed over four hundred times on French soil and has been performed by invitation in Brazil, Luxembourg, Wales, Japan and many North American states. As demands to host the piece both in France and abroad continued, even when its two creators were engaged on their second project (as performers as well as choreographers), they chose to retain it and “hand it on” to young performers, musicians and dancers like themselves, coming from similar training backgrounds (Lyon and Paris conservatoires). 

Source: Arcosm ‘s website ; Maison de la Danse show program

More information : compagniearcosm.fr/en