Walks - Fourteen international artists explore European rural areas.

JULIE
DOYELLE

Julie Doyelle is a puppeteer, actress, director and pedagogue, originally from Strasbourg and now based in Lyon. She is a graduate of the School of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg. An actress in cinema (directed by Klaus Salminen, Ludger Lemper, Beatrix Brunschko, Maja Dekleva, Jean-Philippe Lehoux, Philippe Muyard), in theatre (with Joëlle Sévilla, Alexander Zeldin, Sarkis tcheumlekdjian, Gérard Col, Matthieu Loos), in Forum Theatre (Naje company), and a puppeteer (Cyril Bourgois, Brice Coupey, Filip Auchère, Stéphane Joris, Virginie Schell & Gabriel Hermand-Priquet). She started improvising in 1995 at Inédit Théâtre, she then founded Et Compagnie, which she co-directed until 2014. She co-directed the Spontanéous festival from 2003 to 2013. Today she works within companies Combats Absurdes, Amadeus Rocket and Vilain.e.s, where artistic and political come together.

CHRISTELLE
DELBROUCK

Christelle Delbrouck is a Belgian artist, above all a specialist in theatre improvisation. She won numerous awards and titles at improvisational festivals and competitions all over the Francophone world. She was part of the Tadam Company, she created shows Nadette, A vous de me le dire and Rugueux, she has been part of the Magic Land Theatre team and Moquette Productions. She is an actress in TV production: Full Speed, Il était une fois and Tchatche (Plug TV), Fritkot (RTL / TVI and HD1), Pas sortis de l’auberge (RTL / TVI), A tort ou à raison (RTBF), Ennemi Public, La Trêve, Les Rivières Pourpres, Papa ou Maman, L’Opéra. And an actress in film: Au nom du Fils by Vincent Lannoo, Supercondriaque by Dany Boon, 2 jours, une nuit by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Belgian Disaster! by Patrick Glotz, Comment j’ai rencontré mon père by Maxime Motte, Tamara by Alexandre Castagnetti, La Terre et le sang by Julien Leclercq.

Mathilde
Vrignaud

Mathilde Vrignaud is a choreographer, dancer, performer, based in Paris. She trained at the CNSMDP, Royaumont Abbey, CND and in different programs in Europe, USA and India. Since 2011, with various artistic collaborations and Ensemble Lab // SEM, she has been developing her multidisciplinary choreographic approach in different formats. The walk and the improvisation is one of her basic practices since 2015.

DISCOllective

DISCOllective is DISCOvering a DISCOllocation of people, events, things, notions, beings; as a dancer, performer, choreographer, clown, teacher, writer, producer; and presents the discoveries in formats like performance, installation, happenings, clown acts, publication, workshop, lecture. Once being stationed in Ljubljana, Slovenia, he now practices nomadism, working, living and creating in various places around Europe.

Inbal
Lori

Inbal Lori is a graduate of Jerusalem Art High School (1994) and Nissan Nativ acting studio (2000). Since then she has been writing and acting for television and theatre and has won prizes and scholarships for her acting and writing. Lori started improvising in Tel Aviv in 2001 within the 3FALLING company and ran an improvisation school in the city from 2013 – 2017. In 2015 Lori moved to Berlin and since then she has taught and performed all over the world in places like the USA, Canada, Australia, Colombia and Europe. Her performances include her solo show “Fragments of Life” and duo shows “CLICK” with Tim Orr (San Francisco), “The Lorilees” with Lee White (Canada), “The Fun Fatales” with Paula Galimberti (Spain) and “Playing with the Enemy” with an Arab improviser Zaki Zikani. In Berlin she is working with and coaching the groups “Die Gorillas” and “ImproBerlin”.

Raschid
Daniel Sidgi

Raschid Daniel Sidgi was born in Weimar as a German-Sudanese. He works as a freelance artist: actor for stage, film, TV and radio, musician, producer, rapper, director, activist. He has been improvising theatre for about 15 years. He is a founding member of the Theaterturbine in Leipzig and plays regularly with THEATERSPORT Berlin. Since 2014 he has also been the artistic director of the international impro festival MOMENTA in Leipzig. Sidgi’s work has been shown at numerous festivals and stages at home and abroad. With the Titanick theatre, he won the “Best Performance” award at the Tvardava Teatar international theatre festival in Belgrade, Serbia, in 2010 with the production “Odyssee”. The staging of his play “Where no wind blows” received the 2012 Heidelberg Theater Prize Puck. In 2017 he performed « 89/90 » (Schauspiel Leipzig) at the Berlin Theatertreffen.

Ramona
Krönke

Ramona Krönke grew up in the region of Brandenburg and is one of the female pioneers of German-language impro theatre. She co-founded the 1st Berlin Impro Stage in 1994, later the impro company Quatsch Comedy Club and in 1997 the artistic collective « Die Gorillas », of which she is still a member. For eight years she impersonated the leading role in the weekly live radio play « Ohrenzeuge » for the public broadcasting company Berlin/Brandenburg. With the comedic solo show « Cavewoman » she has been touring Germany with great success for 15 years. Krönke leads the Gorillas impro school and has been a teacher of improvisation for 20 years, among others for the Academy for Children’s Media and the Film University Baden Württemberg.

Beatrix Brunschko

Beatrix Brunschko is a founding member of the Theater im Bahnhof in Graz, where she works as an actress, director and improviser. She is the artistic director of their improvisational program, a member of the international artistic collective Orcas Island Project, a member of the impro ensemble Theater an der Gumpendorferstraße in Vienna, a performer and co-creator of the international project Community. In 2018, she co-founded two feminist impro collectives – My Own Private Moskow and Mary Shelley’s Mothers. As a performer and a pedagogue, she has performed at various festivals in Europe, North America and Australia. She is Senior Lecturer for dramatic Arts at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz.

Alenka
MARINIČ

Alenka Marinič is a Ljubljana based theatre artist and one of the founders of collective Narobov, devoted to exploring live and living art, be it street interventions, theatre events, radio interventions or interactive performances. The methods and concepts are based on improvisation and collective work. Besides Narobov she is a co-founder of a two women theatre company Bimbo Teater and a physical theatre company Globus Hystericus. She is working as an actress and a writer on television, in film, on radio and in clown projects. Alenka has been performing and teaching improvisation, clown play and physical theatre in Slovenia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Ireland, USA, Croatia and the Netherlands.

Giovanni Fusetti

Giovanni Fusetti is an Italian multidisciplinary artist. Natural scientist, theatre artist, pedagogue, Gestalt therapist, he works as a teacher, director and process facilitator, exploring theatre as a tool for artistic training, educational healing and emotional awareness. Trained in agriculture and ecology at the University of Padova, he became passionate about the social and educational use of theatre. Street theatre, puppets, storytelling, clown and political theatre, led him to the Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris, where he was student, pedagogic assistant and teacher of improvisation. He has been the pedagogical director of KIKLOS school and he is the founding – pedagogic director of HELIKOS, International School of Theatre Creation, founded in Florence in 2010 and now based in Padova, Italy.

Marko
Mayerl

Marko Mayerl is an actor, improviser, author and teacher. He has been artistic director of the company Inédit Théâtre for over 20 years and is founder of the Amateur Theatrical Improvisation League in Strasbourg. He is trained as an improviser, mime, clown and, more recently, he discovered the Meisner technique, in which he trained in London. His work with Inédit Théâtre has many aspects, for example, the non-stop week long impro shows, which aimed to question time, the relationship to the public, and instant theatrical creation. He also created and performs Slow, a theatrical show and technique that aims to create theatrical moments out of what already exists on stage. Marko is also an applied theatre practitioner and is passionate about using theatre as a tool for social transformation. He also works at the University of Strasbourg as a theatre teacher.

Sean
Gittins

Sean Gittins is a theatre and television actor, writer, teacher, and a trained play therapist and meditation teacher. He is based in London and Italy, originally being from South Wales. He has trained with various teachers in London and Europe and spent two years at L’Ecole Philippe Gaulier in Paris training in clown, improvisation and theatre, and two years at the Actor’s Temple in London, specialising in the Meisner technique and advanced theatrical improvisation along with script analysis. He teaches at several organisations in London including Azbuka school, Goldsmiths University and in private practice. Recent projects include improvisation performances in France with Inédit Théâtre, several commercials for leading brands in the UK, arts council England-funded projects and working with The Fabulous Backstrom Brothers on their new clown-inspired show.

Maja Dekleva Lapajne

Maja Dekleva Lapajne is a director, performer, member of Kolektiv Narobov, artistic director of the Naked Stage Festival. Her current projects include: Underwater, a performative concert on precarious life; Community, a piece performed by an international cast with various different economic, political and cultural backgrounds dealing with questions of collaboration, co-creation and coexistence; 4play, a performance by Mary Shelley’s Mothers, focusing on the topic of sex through feministic standpoints; Silver Gold, a project where different dance generations meet, exchange memories and create new ones; Life.Refabricated., a performative and writing practice with Norbert Sven Fö on topics of improvisation, revolution and love. In the years 2013-2015 she was one of the directors in the European project Should I Stay or Should I Go?, in the years 2017 – 2019 she was the artistic director of the international cooperation project Our Lives.

Matthieu
Loos

Matthieu Loos is an artist trained in Strasbourg and an Alsatian scientist deformed in dramatic art. After graduate studies in physics and a solid experience as a teenage actor, his professional life began between 2002 and 2006 through the simultaneous jobs of research engineer and actor. In both fields, the same desire to represent the world agitates him, combining a taste for uncertainty and its poetic rigor. Insubmissive poet, he is the author of the book « A clock is not time », published by Libel in November 2016. Actor, he sails between theatre and audiovisual, sometimes leaving the company life (Ostinato / Olivier Maurin, Amadeus Rocket / Alexandre Chetail, Inédit Théâtre / Marko Mayerl) for that, more solitary, of film sets. Since 2010, he is orchestrating the collective creations of Combats Absurdes. And since 2023, he is the co-director of « Le Ciel, European stage for children and youth », based in Lyon.

WALK – Mathilde Vrignaud and DISCOllective

DISCOllective and Mathilde Vrignaud will be walking in the rural areas of Goričko, Prekmurje and Prlekija following the Ledava river. They will be walking backwards, moving forward while watching the biggest spectacle ever: the world they are walking from. This artistic proposal puts them thus in the role of professional spectators. And as such they will be inviting people they meet on the road and different local communities to join them as spectators of this inexhaustible spectacle. Their walking proposal renders all questions, answers, feelings, thoughts, visions foremost as an embodied experience of observing life and exploring how lives, events and experiences weave themselves into a delicate embroidery of coexistence. And there’s an extra: your body posture ameliorates by walking backwards. Bingo!

WALK – Julie Doyelle and Christelle Delbrouck

Two women, two stools, a thermos of coffee.
Along their walk, when Julie Doyelle and Christelle Delbrouck meet someone, they take the time to sit down, to discover each other, to share. They weave a joyful thread between people they meet, carrying presents from one to the other, singing a song and repeating a few words that their previous guest has shared. Their Walk takes place in the Belgian and French Ardennes, on the border of the Gaume. Their goal is to discover the humans living there, understand why they do and what they wish for their neighbors.

WALK – Ramona Krönke and Beatrix Brunschko

Ramone Krönke and Beatrix Brunschko will be walking in the area of Brandenburg. Their duo is called the Grimm Sisters. Like the Grimm Brothers 200 years earlier, they want to save folk poetry from oblivion and preserve a unique collection of stories for posterity. Their role models are the forgotten women and fairy tale contributors who set out to collect fairy tales, legends and myths for the Grimm Brothers, with which the brothers built a monument for themselves for all eternity. The Grimm Sisters will wander through Brandenburg to collect contemporary folk poetry – stories, legends, rumors, anecdotes, mysteries, tragedies and comedies from everyday life in Brandenburg and later refabricate them artistically and give them back to Brandenburg, assigning places and monuments where they happened, performing them in shows, telling stories to people they meet on the way.

WALK – Inbal Lori and Raschid Sidgi

Inbal Lori and Raschid Daniel Sidgi will walk in Thuringia. Raschid is of Sudanese descent; his father fled to what was then the GDR in 1974. Inbal moved from Israel to Berlin 6 years ago. For her the Middle East is a place that she has also escaped from. Thuringia is where Sidgi’s childhood took place. Sidgi will lead Lori through a landscape of his early life, but not necessarily of what he would call “his homeland”. His relationship to these places is ambivalent. Childhood memories and friends contrast with being stigmatized as a stranger, as one of the very few people with a different skin color. His decision to leave Thuringia as an adult as quickly as possible was his escape. Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, Israeli, German and Sudanese. These are the layers of biography and identity that they carry with them everywhere they go. Both of them have some Arab background (Lori’s family are Iraqi-Iranian Jews), both of them carry political and cultural narratives whether they like it or not, and both feel like they belong and don’t belong at the same time. They will be walking the topics of escape, migration, fitting and not fitting, and all these in areas where nowadays the xenophobia is on the rise and the radical right movements are gaining power. Creating shows, making concerts, performing in houses and squares, interviewing the people who live there, bringing and developing their art from and for these encounters.

WALK – Alenka MARINIČ and Giovanni Fusetti

Alenka Marinič and Giovanni Fusetti will be walking on the border between Italy and Slovenia and create from the land and the people that have been for centuries living in an area full of conflict due to wars, nationalism, differences in political systems, lately covid closures and the rise of radical right wing parties and organizations. On the other hand people in this area coexist and co-create in the rich and beautiful mixture of languages and cultures. Marinič and Fusetti will work with these topics through physical theatre, embodiment, mimodynamics, street interventions and poetry. Another topic the two might artistically reprocess within the Walks is the student-teacher relationship, looking deep into processes of learning and exchanging, playing and overcoming roles.

WALK – Marko Mayerl and Sean Gittins

Marko Mayerl and Sean Gittins will walk in the rural area around the Compostelle Pilgrim path in South-West France, taking into exploration the ideas of pilgrimage and the weights we all carry with us through life. The past, the people, the relationships, the family, the collective memory, the culture, the history, the emotions, the financial responsibility, the work responsibility, the knowledge, the burden, the support. In order to embrace this topic on a tangible level, the artists will carry 20kg of clay with them each from the beginning of their walk. This clay will act as a metaphor for the “weights” in life and will offer a starting point for the conversations with people they encounter on the way. The clay will also serve as the base for their performances on specific places on the pilgrim trail. The audience will be invited to cut off a piece of clay and mould it into something from their life that represents a “weight”. The artists will discuss the topics with the participating audience and perform improvisations based on the sculptures. The artists will then take the sculptures on their continuation of the walk and find places to leave them, fitting in with their symbolic meaning and the experience.

WALK – Maja Dekleva Lapajne and Matthieu Loos

Maja Dekleva Lapajne and Matthieu Loos, artistic co-directors of the project, undertake the first walk in Alsace, France. This walk is an opportunity to try out the artistic, productional and research principles that will be running in all the walks described above. The unique and fundamental guideline of their work is « collect and share »: the artistic transformation of what is perceived by the artists on their path and with the people they meet. Once the experience is artistically reprocessed, it feeds back the land and the people, co-creating the space of living. This pure concept allows a maximum porosity between the artists’ experience and their spontaneous creation. No artistic act must fit into a framework, except to be nourished by the experience of the walk itself. Their second walk takes place in Slovenia. They are therefore the only duo that will not retrace their steps. But can one really retrace one’s steps?

JUN 2022

Artistic and Production Meeting – Germany
Core team meeting, start of the project

SEP 2022

WALK.0 – FRANCE

Maja Dekleva Lapajne (SLO) and Matthieu Loos (FRA)
Alsace, France

DEC 2022

Artistic Meeting – Italy
Meeting of the artistic directors of the project

JAN 2023

Artistic Ground Workshop – Slovenia
Gathering of all the artists and the core team, designing and preparing the first Walks

>APR-MAY 2023

WALK.1 – GERMANY, FRANCE AND SLOVENIA

6 walks all around Europe, involving 12 artists – more infos

APRIL 8 > 17, 2023

DISCOllective and Mathilde Vrignaud
Prekmurje, Slovenia

APRIL 23 > MAY 03, 2023

Inbal Lori and Raschid Sidgi
Thüringen, Germany

APRIL 24 > MAY 03, 2023

Sean Gittins and Marko Mayerl
Compostelle pilgrimage path, France

MAY 2 > 11, 2023

Alenka Marinič and Giovanni Fusetti
Slovenian-Italian border

MAY 09 > 18, 2023

Christelle Delbrouck and Julie Doyelle
Ardennes Region, French-Belgian border

MAY 15 > 24, 2023

Beatrix Brunschko and Ramona Krönke
Brandenburg, Germany

JUN 2023

Artistic Exchange Workshop
Gathering of all the artists and the core team, sharing experiences and preparing the second round of Walks

AUG-OCT 2023

WALK.2 – GERMANY, FRANCE AND SLOVENIA

7 walks all around Europe, involving 14 artists – more infos

AUGUST 23 > SEPTEMBER 1, 2023

DISCOllective and Mathilde Vrignaud
Prekmurje, Slovenia

SEPTEMBER 11 > 20, 2023