Soon, a new theatre will open in Paris

Elizabeth Czerczuk devises the dramatic experience as a catharsis, for the actors as well as for the audience. It must be a search for the inner truth and the true form.
In this intense corporal theater, both deep-rooted and spiritual, the audience is engaged in a singular relationship with the actors in a space where the borders between the stage and the audience fade.

A laboratory to explore artistic radicality

Researching what is at the opposite of superficiality, that is the whole purpose of this laboratory. It ought to be a way to renew and stimulate the mind, to sharpen the sensibility, to strengthen the imagination and to awaken the humanness. A research born from the need to provoke and shake the public, the objective being to stimulate his existential reasoning and even his anxiety.

A place of creation

Following her well-recognized creation Dementia Praecox which was set up in 2016 in the Paris catacombs, Elizabeth Czerczuk invested a new space in the 12th district of Paris, where she is working on her new creation, Requiem pour les artistes. The latter is a tribute to her spiritual masters (Tadeusz Kantor, Jerzy Grotowski and Antonin Artaud) and will be first performance shown to the public on the night of the theatre opening on the 5th of October. Next will ensue performances of her previous creations.

A place where you can meet and talk

As soon as spring 2018, Elizabeth Czerczuk will host artists whose work is related to her immersive and radical artistic approach. Besides, writers, philosophers, playwrights and sociologists, whose action is alert and resisting the sheep-like attitude typical of our time, as Witkiewicz would say.

A school : Le Laboratoire d'Expression Théâtrale (The Laboratory of Theatrical Expression)

In this school, students will be taught how to perform with their entire body on stage: they will work on the voice, the dance moves, the interior rhythm… A performance will take place at the end of each training course. Shorter master classes will be offered all year long to focus on specific aspects of acting.

Practical information

Located near Place de la Nation (20th district of Paris), the theatre can host 200 spectators at once. You are also welcome in our bar where the public can discuss with the actors and a shady garden. Artists are welcome to stay in our many studios to practice their art.

Dementia Praecox is a total and radical creation that explores the fall into madness to talk about "human evils". An insane artist, a nun alienated by her devotion, a failed poet and a rejected lover… Frustration, confinement, social diktats, suicides, eroticism, absurdity, resurrections… Everything comes and goes so fast that it all slips away from them !
Both poetic and moving, Elizabeth Czerczuk's choreographed theatre has its roots in pure emotion and rises to complete madness. She invites the audience to discover a new hybrid language at the crossroad between the voice, the movement and the theatrics. In this cultural melting pot, all tongues are loosened. Elizabeth Czerczuk knocks down the fourth wall and the spectator becomes an actor of the creation.

Staging and choreography: Elizabeth Czerczuk
Original music: Sergio Gruz
Lightning desk and sound controls: Tsiresy Begana, Adrien Colomb
Casting:  Elzbieta Rosa Desbois, Roland Girault, Nadia Glogowski, Yvan Gradis, Erik Karol, Nadezhda Larina, Grzegorz Onyskiewicz, Chantal Pavese, Sarah Pierret, Zbigniew Rola, Roxy R. Théobald, Julien Villacampa Boya Saura, Özge Pelin Tüfekçi

In the press

"Forget about realism: E. Czerczuk wipes out the dramatic conventions and invites you to a powerful and disorienting experience". Mathieu Perez (Le Canard enchaîné, 27th of April 2016)

"The tales of extra-ordinary madness […] This is a kind of 2.0 theatre: troubling, unsettling and even trying. But you come out of this performance with the feeling of having witnessed (and also participated to) a radical performance that few theaters offer nowadays". Richard Caisse (Médiapart)

Inspired by «La Mère» by St.I. Witkiewicz 

Matka carries the audience into a perfectly organized madness. Surrounded by her son and strange unsettling creatures, this woman sways between purity and monstrosity in the middle of  furniture and mirrors, which move like magic on stage.
Both clear-headed and bizarre, this creation attires itself with the most unusual beauty, leaving the spectator completely stunned.
In this disorienting debauchery, the director Elizabeth Czerczuk reveals a powerful and surprising creation. She follows that way the multidisciplinary tradition of a still little known theatre: the Polish theatre.
Witkiewicz is a charismatic figure of the Polish theatre, who also was a explorer, a daring experimenter, a nihilist, a comedian, a novelist, a painter and a playwright. Kantor considered him as one of his masters and his profoundly ironic theatre has not lost anything of its funniness and its intensity. Matka is an electric play, of which Witkiewicz said that it was "undervoltage", and we regret that this kind of theatre is not staged more often.

Staging and choreography: Elizabeth Czerczuk
Casting: Elizabeth Czerczuk, Zbigniew Rola, Yann Lemo, Roxy R. Théobald, Julien Villacampa Boya Saura, Szandra Deàki, Özge Pelin Tüfekçi
Original music: Sergio Gruz
Lightning desk: Tsiresy Begana, Adrien Colomb

In the press

"The actress and director EC plays with the singing, the lights, the beautiful music and mostly the body language… all at the same time" La Provence

"With Matka, EC gives a wonderful, atypical and unique performance, in accordance with the theory of the pure form, imagined by the Polish writer, painter and philosopher, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewic" Froggy's Delight

Elizabeth Czerczuk presents her new creation, Requiem pour les artistes.

A procession of living deads marches and comes back to life beneath one's very eyes as their memories escape from the heavy cases they carry. They will walk through what seems to be a purgatory to relive their past and confront it and maybe succeed in changing it.
Elizabeth Czerczuk's theatre means to offer a possibility of emancipation to her spectators by exposing them to their own condition of a contemporary individual cut from all his desires.  The spectator only needs to surrender to the emotional waltz and discover his interior wealth in this unique cathartic experience offered by the director and inspired by Tadeusz Kantor and  Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz.

Staging and choreography: Elizabeth Czerczuk
Original music: Sergio Gruz
Lightning desk and sound controls: Tsiresy Begana, Adrien Colomb
Casting: Szandra Deáki, Eric Fontaine, Roland Girault, Yvan Gradis, Erik Karol, Yann Lemo, Grzegorz Onyskiewicz, Barbara Orzelowska, Chantal Pavese, Sarah Pierret, Zbigniew Rola, Elzbieta Rosa Desbois, Elzbieta  Swiatkowska, Roxy R. Théobald, Özge Pelin Tüfekçi, Julien Villacampa Boya Saura