The curse of blablaland

« Best ensemble » award winning at the New Zealand Improv Festival 2017.

Interview by NZIF here

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The show

Once upon a time in a faraway land, there was a little town of chatty people called Blahblahland. Each time a silence came, one of them told a joke, said absurd sentences, jumped in a complex philosophical theory to fill the unsustainable acoustic blank. They never listened and always interrupted each other. The buzz echoed kilometers around, day and night.

Step by step, neighbour villages left and Blahblahland was completely isolated from the world.

One day, Gods voted unanimously that this big human tinnitus had to stop. In the evening, they cast a spell on the village. A lightning bolt teared the sky and divided into thousands of lightning bolts which each one touched a villager. A dead silence came. For the first time, all of them were sleeping at the same time.

When they woke up, nobody could speak. Words had disappeared as if nobody had learnt to talk. Everybody panicked and they didn’t understand each other anymore!

Then, day after day, Villagers of Blahblahland learnt a new way of speaking…

This show tells the story of Blahblahland villagers, from the day they lost all words.

The workshop

 Is it possible to tell a story without saying a word and without being boring? 

When we tame the fear of saying nothing, when we start to use our body and be creative with it, we enter in a wonderful poetic world which gives rise to clowns, choral metaphors and dancing scenes.  

In this workshop, I share what I have learned, what I like to play with and what I believe in as an improvisor. I’m convinced that physical theater is powerful. Our work will be based on three things: 

• Physical theater techniques inspiring by Ira Seidenstein’s method,
• mask techniques from what I learned from Mark Jane and Steve Jarand
• group connection.