Earth is tired. It has decided to take a little rest. Out of her slumber will come a winter like no other. To exist, a story must be told. IJSBERG’s story plunges us into a world of its own, funny and fluffy, in a forest where a shaggy old man lives peacefully. Until the day an iceberg runs aground near his cabin. From that moment on, past and future meet, the snow makes music, the trees talk, and the rabbits always fear the hungry wolves. With its moving bodies, musical poetry and video inspired by Nordic landscapes, IJSBERG is an ode to nature in all its beauty and complexity.
IJSBERG questions our relationship with living things, and invites us to imagine a new horizon in which Nature is a character in its own right.
“Only ice and time are masters” – Greenlandic proverb
Direction and interpretation /
Alexandre Finck and Adrien Fournier
Musical creation and interpretation /
Jules Jacquet
Lighting design /
Jean-Baptiste Cadeau
Video creation /
Adrien Fournier
TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THIS CREATION :
IJSBERG is a poetic, gentle and apocalyptic show for the whole family. A feel-good show where everyone sees and hears the same thing, but sees and hears differently. A show where realism and fantasy blend!
The Compagnie Discrète was born on September 8, 2014 under the initiative of two mime comedian artists, Adrien Fournier and Alexandre Finck. Together they practice “mime-cartoon”, a contemporary gestural theater blending references to Tex Avery cartoons, the cinema of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, the humor of Michel Courtemanche and the technique of Marcel Marceau…
“We trust everyone’s imagination, making our work accessible to all ages, including non-French speakers. In this creation, however, the work is less cartoonish. There will be less “sound effects” to leave more room for the music, which will be performed live on stage.
For this creation, the company’s work drew on responses to a questionnaire sent out to various audiences, readings, meetings and scientific studies, as well as trips to Sweden and Norway to collect sounds, images… Creating together to discuss together. Raise awareness of the energy transition through art, and encourage discussion in other circles. Take a deep breath and rethink our relationship with nature.
As with their other creations, the background is serious, but the company turns it into something funny and touching. “We want to touch the audience, an audience we want to be as broad as possible, by denouncing the absurdities of the world around us without pointing fingers, but by revealing the contemporary poetry hidden in our daily lives.” Here, they talk about ecology, making Nature the main character of the story. In close proximity to the audience, the actors invite us to reflect and engage in dialogue, creating a poetically and politically powerful ode to nature.
Inspired by Miyazaki’s universe and poetry, the set design and live music link up with the artists’ gestures, inviting us to daydream and have a snow fight! The actors’ performance resonates with Adrien Fournier’s animated projections, reminiscent of pop-up books.
Why mime?
“For the universality. The language of the body is universal, with only the actor’s body, without sets or costumes, everything can be created by mime. Any will of creation is pushed by a need to transmit something, to make pass a message. There are different ways to communicate, the word, governed by words, is the main tool in the art of the scene. We have chosen mime, an art where words are gestures, symbolizing movements of thought sometimes more eloquent than rhetoric. Mime touches all people and lowers the barriers of languages, generations, cultures and borders.
Our work is a mixture of several disciplines. A mixture of mime, body theater, cartoon and clown. The clown brings us the rigor on the stage and a different relationship with the public. It is through our training in mask and nose (given by Didier Girauldon) at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Tours that we created our artistic language. A strong instinctive and readable language that allows us to travel wherever we want, the only limit is the lack of imagination. Our own discipline: a contemporary mime. This gives us the pleasure of playing, it gives us the freedom of creation and the public, on its side, keeps its freedom of interpretation. For us, a creation is never finished for good. It remains alive and malleable. Thus our work remains in constant evolution.”