BEGINNINGS
The Theatre du Soleil is a Parisian avant-garde stage ensemble founded by a group of ten idealistic young students in 1964. Ariane Mnouchkine led the collective to become Theatre artist devoted to the pursuit of an intercultural form of performance utilising improvisation, masks and pantomime.
The company has tried to make oppositional interventions into popular culture by contesting the ways in which we are invited to live and represent ourselves in the political leadership of capitalism.
LOCATED
The Théâtre du Soleil is located in Cartoucherie, an old munitions factory complex in the Vincennes area of eastern Paris.
DIRECTOR
"Theatre is doubtless the most fragile of the arts,
the theatre public is now really a very small group, but the theatre keeps reminding us of the possibility to collectively seek the histories of the people and to tell them [...] The contradictions, the battles of power, and the split in ourselves will always exist. I think the theatre best tells us of the enemy in ourselves. Yes, theatre is a grain of sand in the works."
- Ariane Mnouchkine
The company creates new theatrical works using a devising process based on utilising physical theatre and improvisation. Its main purpose, unchanged since 1968 is to inspire a new relationship between the theatre and the public and to be distinguished from theatre bougeois, creating a more popular, transcendental, universal form of theatre.
COMPANY PHILOSOPHY
The company built its process based on the concept of a theatre company as a tribe or a family, a community of equal citizens: everyone receives the same wages, and the workday follows a schedule to which all actors, musicians and production assistants rigorously accommodate. The final casting or distribution of roles for all productions is decided upon only after all the performers in a production improvise, practice and audition numerous (if not all the) roles.
No principal roles or lead actors are defined in it productions. Helene Cixous, a French feminist author-philosopher, has been associated with the company as it principal playwright since the late 1970s or early 80s, writing and scoring the vast majority of the company's recent productions through a collaborative process, which develops through the improvisational exercises of the performers during any 9 to 12 month rehearsal period for a production. this collaborative writing process lends itself to productions of extended length, sometimes ranging between 3 and 6 hours in duration.
STAGING
Although the Théâtre du Soleil is located in Cartoucherie, the companies productions are often performed in unconventional venues such as barns or gymnasiums, as Mnouchkine does not like being confined to a typical stage. She feels theatre cannot be restricted with the "fourth wall". While the official native stage of the company is a typical procenium/thrust stage, the theatre space is marked by specific communal (stage-right) devoted to the live orchestrations of the company's principal composer and solo musician Philippe Leotard, and a large open lobby or social space where audience and actors convene before, after and during intermissions of each show to get refreshments and engage in conversation.
When audiences enter a Mnouchkine production, they have the opportunity to peek through holes in the large, canvas curtain separating the audience space from the actor space, to observe the actors preparing (eg. putting on make-up, getting into costume, warming up, etc). Sometimes, the troupe develops ideas out of improvisational exercises
[Williams, D. (1999). Collaborative Theatre: The theatre du soleil sourcebook. London : Routledge]
