Elizabeth Czerczuk's artistic ambition is to create a new form of theatre to match the widening of our minds, so crucial in our time. This new form is inseparable from a deep-rooted research of the emotion and a total investment : vocal, gestural, choreographic and emotional. This artistic melting pot is the sign of a new era where all experiments are possible. The TEC is no poetry of language, but a poetry of space and movement. She is searching for a way to express herself through her body, to be independent from the language and its meaning. The stage of her theatre is a place where every night brings something unique for the actors as well as for the audience.

Artistic director

Director, choreographer and actor

Born in Wroclaw in Poland, Elizabeth Czerczuk is immersed right from her youth in the theatrical atmosphere of two important people of this city: Jerzy Grotowski and Henryk Tomaszewski, two major faces of the Polish stage. She begins her training at the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art, in 1984, in Cracow, the city of Tadeusz Kantor.

In 1991, thanks to a grant from the French government, she enters the Conservatory in Paris, in order to follow the teaching of Daniel Mesguich, Philippe Adrien and Jean-Pierre Vincent. She also studied at the Marcel Marceau mime school and she perfects her formation with the Comédie-Française, with Daniel Mesguich, and then with Karine Saporta, especially for her choreography on Colette, becoming afterward the person in charge of the production and the promotion of her company in Poland and Japan.

Still astride between Poland and France, she tries to find, through her multiple theatrical activities, to learn about her roots, and to link her two cultures: French and Polish. Her goal is to mix the French technic with the emotion inherent to the Polish dramatic art. 

Actor and dancer

In Poland, she starts as an actress, under the direction of important directors: Jerzy Sthur; Waldemar Smigasiewicz, Jerzy Grotowski…

Out of her native country, she plays Serafombix in The sale of the demonic woman, a play inspired by Witkiewicz, under the direction of Zofia Kalinska, collaborator of Tadeusz Kantor, in the Grand Meeting Company Theater, in England ; Edwige in Le Canard sauvage by Ibsen, choreographed by Karine Saporta and presented in several festivals in Scandinavia, and then at the Théâtre de la Ville, in Paris. She then played Salomé, by Oscar Wilde, with Daniel Mesguich as advisor in staging, in the context of international festivals in Leipzig, Saint-Pétersbourg, Almada-Lisbonne, Dresde, as well as Avignon repeatedly.

Director

Elizabeth Czerczuk creates her own company/troup in 1992 and, creates her own shows, often dictated by the voice of important Polish authors. Moreover, she creates shows containing a strong message, like Le Cri d’Ophélie, based on Study on Hamlet by Wyspianski or Matka from Witkiewicz.

She also pays tribute to important compatriots, such as Adam Mickiewicz in 1998 for the bicentenary of her birth, where she develops Les Adieux (parts II and III) and Tadeusz Kantor in 2015 for the centenary of her birth, with Le Banc de l’école. She stages Le Cri d’Yvonne the same year, inspired of Yvonne, princesse de Bourgogne by Gombrowicz (selected for the 12 x 12 festival, in Paris, and played in Théâtre de l’Aquarium, at the Cartoucherie in Vincennes).

The director is received in France and across Europe on national stages and during international festivals. She always meets a very favorable reception from the medias and the public, especially in Avignon.

Elizabeth Czerczuk also offers lectures, dramatizations of her own creations and adaptations of the works of contemporary European dramatists who contributed to the renewal of the theatrical stage, like Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet and Jon Fosse, among which Le Rêve d’automne gives place to the choreographed performance L’Adieu à l’automne.

Director of theater and european project director

In 2002, after the death of the grand master of pantomime H. Tomaszewski, she is nominated at the head of his theater, where she manages the administrative team but while pursuing the artistic line of her creator.

From 2010 to 2012, she creates and manages the artistic project Homme@Home focusing on current environmental issues, with the support of the European commission, as part of the programme “Culture 2007-2013”. During this time, she worked with artists from four countries, such as Carolyn Carlson and Karine Saporta. One of the five performances, “Carnaval”, was staged by Elizabeth Czerczuk in the Nowy Theater in Lodz, in Poland. These performances were presented with exhibitions and practical workshop.

In 2013, she takes possession of a place she named the Théâtre Laboratoire Elizabeth Czerczuk, in tribute to her master Grotowski.

This place allows her to begin a personal and multidisciplinary approach, by mixing all the forms of artistic expressions: theater, dance, music, pictorial effect.

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)