Vitry’s Studio Théâtre, Bérangère Vantusso, its director and director, and Florence Kremper, head of the research division
Research at the Vitry Studio-Theatre was born out of a vital need for artists to get out of the frantic race for creation.
Florence Kremper, head of the research division, tells us about this unique project imagined by the director and puppeteer Bérangère Vantusso. The singular creative process of the latter began in 2000 with its company three six thirty, oriented towards a research theatre where puppets, actors and sound compositions meet in the service of a contemporary writing. In 2006, with the creation of Jon Fosse’s Kant, for example, the three-six-thirty company already asserted its identity by making hyperrealism the link between theatre and contemporary puppetry. Bérangère Vantusso conceives with Marguerite Bordat strange figures at the threshold of the living and stages The Blind of Maeterlinck, The Wild Grass of Eddy Pallaro, Violet of Jon Fosse and Anna’s Dream Eddy Pallaro in 2014.
In 2017, Bérangère Vantusso became director of the Vitry Studio-Theatre and asked Florence Kremper to follow her in this new artistic adventure by becoming head of the theatre’s research division. At the start of the project, there is a need to get out of a frantic race for creation, to have time to seek, to experiment, to question oneself.
This is why, for them, the ambition is clear: Vitry’s Studio Theatre must be a place of research for artists. They set up two important facilities within the theatre: research residencies for artistic teams and the organization of meetings twice a year between artists and researchers.
Research residencies allow artists and their teams to come and work collectively to contribute to the reflection on their artistic project. They have the particularity of being outside a creative project, without the pressures of production and the imperatives of result. “This time of research is essential to make room for the unexpected, surprises, to put risk back in a project,” explains Florence Kremper. During their residencies, artists are asked to collect traces of their research processes that they record on an online logbook, “Les Cahiers du Studio”, a multimedia tool designed and developed within the theatre.
Meetings are the second main focus of their project. Noting the isolation of artists who exchange little about their creative process, they imagined regular exchanges between artists and researchers. Open to the public, these meetings are a place to share questions related to the production of shows. Vitry’s Studio-Theatre has become the ideal matrix for welcoming creative intuitions and letting them germinate.