To the fathers I keep staging

The wreck of a sailboat, a vast icy landscape on the background and a crew of hopeless survivors. S 62° 58’, W 60° 39’ starts  with an impossible and frightening situation: to survive. To go back to  the life they knew. It is unclear how they got stuck in this  predicament. Their GPS coordinates – S 62° 58’, W 60° 39’ – indicate  their precise location in the Arctic water of Deception Island. But  before we get any answers, a performer adresses the director. The story  falls apart to reveal something else, a delicate trauma that has fueled  the director’s oeuvre. A trauma the performers do not want to play  anymore.

In Franck Chartier’s newest creation,  fragility takes center stage. A search for truth and authentic emotions  takes everyone past their limits. The performers lay bare their emotions  and lives, but also fight against the director’s push to go even  deeper. After years of sacrifice, willing or forced, they start to  wonder what would happen if they refused. Fiction and reality are  ruptured in an attempt to escape the vicious cycles of violence.  Performers try to stage a revolution, an end to everything, a new  beginning. But that might just be another work of fiction.

In a constant rewinding and repeating process of rehearsing trauma, set against an unrelenting Arctic landscape, S 62° 58’, W 60° 39’ touches  on new discussions about what we want to create on stage in this day  and age. Is this the only way we can process our traumas? What poetry do  we want to leave behind? What message? Or should we actually stop  creating for once? Should the director let go of it all?

Source: Peeping Tom

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Franck Chartier (°1967, Roanne, FR) started dancing when he was eleven, and at the age of fifteen his mother sent him to study classical ballet at Rosella Hightower in Cannes. Upon graduating, he joined Maurice Béjart’s Ballet du 20ème Siècle, where he worked between 1986 and 1989. For the following three years he worked with Angelin Preljocaj, dancing in Le spectre de la rose at the Opéra de Paris. He moved to Brussels in 1994, to dance in Rosas’ production "Kinok" (1994), and he stayed on, working on duos with Ine Wichterich and Anne Mouselet, as well as in productions by Needcompany ( "Tres", 1995) and Les Ballets C de la B: "La Tristeza Complice" (1997), "Iets op Bach" (1997) and "Wolf" (2002). More recently, Franck has adapted Peeping Tom’s "32 rue Vandenbranden" for the Göteborg Opera: "33 rue Vandenbranden" (2013), and created the choreography for the opera Marouf, savetier du Caire, by Jérôme Deschamps, at the Opéra Comique de Paris (2013). October 1st 2015 marked the premiere of "The lost room" in The Hague (NL), a second collaboration with Nederlands Dans Theater after Carrizo’s 2013 "The missing door". Franck has been the artistic director of Peeping Tom, along with Gabriela Carrizo, since they co-founded the company in 2000.

Source: Peeping Tom's website

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Juliette Belanger is a director and editor, mainly in the field of live performance (theater, dance, music, etc.).

It was during her first years of study in Métiers des Arts et de la Culture, which she began in Lille in 2018 and finished in Paris in 2021, that Juliette developed her skills and taste for images and video creation. 

She soon became intrigued by the world of live performance, and her first professional experiences began in 2019. Between theater festivals, companies and other production associations, she discovers and defends the stakes of video for the dissemination of live performance. She completed her university studies in 2022, taking the Licence Professionnelle Techniques et Pratiques Artistiques du montage at Lyon II.  

She discovered the world of dance in 2023, working with Fabien Plasson, video director at the Pôle Image de la Maison de la Danse. 

Today, she produces and edits video footage of theater and dance performances for various festivals, companies and cultural events, while continuing to create various video content around the performing arts (reports on creations, artist portraits, etc.).

Gabriela Carrizo (I/AR) and Franck Chartier (F) founded Peeping Tom in 2000. Together they created a first location project that was taking place in a trailer home, Caravana (1999), with would-be long-time collaborator Eurudike De Beul, followed by the film Une vie inutile (2000). 

Peeping Tom’s hallmark is a hyperrealistic aesthetic anchored to a concrete set: a garden, a living room and a basement in the first trilogy ( Le Jardin , 2002; Le Salon , 2004; and Le Sous Sol , 2007), two trailer homes in a snow-covered landscape in 32 rue Vandenbranden (2009), or a burned theatre in A Louer (2011). In these, the directors create an unstable universe that defies the logic of time and space. Isolation leads to an unconscious world of nightmares, fears and desires, which the creators deftly use to shed light on the dark side of a character or a community. The huis clos of family situations remains for Peeping Tom a major source of creativity. The company has started working on a second trilogy – Vader (Father), Moeder (Mother), Kinderen (Children) – around this theme, with Vader (Father) already having premiered. 

In 2005, Le Salon was awarded the Prix du Meilleur Spectacle de Danse (Best Dance Show Prize) in France. In 2007, the company received the Mont Blanc Young Directors Award during the Salzburg Festival and the Patrons Circle Award at the Melbourne International Arts Festival. The pieces Le Sous Sol , A Louer and Vader (Father) all got selected for the Theaterfestival, which gathers the most remarkable shows of the past season in Belgium and The Netherlands. In 2013, A Louer was nominated for the prestigious Ubu Awards in Italy, in the category Best Performance in Foreign Language, during the theatrical season 2012-2013. 32 rue Vandenbranden was elected Best Dance Show of the Year 2013 in São Paulo (BR) by magazine Guia Folha and won in 2015 a prestigious Olivier Award, in the category 'Best New Dance Production'.

Peeping Tom's latest production, Vader (Father), is the first part of the trilogy Father-Mother-Children. It premiered on 10 May 2014 in Theater im Pfalzbau (Ludwigshafen, DE). Apart from being in the official selection of the Theaterfestival 2015, it was also elected Best Dance Performance of 2014 by Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. The jury of the 'Premios de la Crítica Barcelona' awarded Vader in its turn with a first prize in the category 'Best International Dance Production of 2014'. 

Source: Peeping Tom

More information : peepingtom.be