ABOUT /////
Chloé Déchery
Chloé Déchery is a French writer, performer and theatre-maker living and working in London since 2006.
Déchery has been presenting lecture-performances, theatre shows, guided tours and short interventions in the UK in festivals and venues such as Arnolfini, Forest Fringe, the Junction, the BAC, Toynbee Studios, Shunt, Oval House, Siobhan Davies Space, but also internationally (Estonia, France). Her practice leans across disciplines of Live Art, experimental theatre and movement, questioning what is at the core of the live event. She is interested in playfully exploring the nature of the theatrical event and the relationship between the performer and the performed-to. Déchery’s main subject matters include communication and language issues, body and its representations, cultural identities and the way we constantly re-invent ourselves.
Déchery does solo and collaborative works, sharing an on-going dialogue with long-term collaborators coming from different artistic backgrounds. She often starts with a concept or an initial structure, blurring frontiers between autobiography, fiction and a more documentary-like approach; playing with expectations and disappointment while deconstructing the mechanisms of theatre. She likes to invent forms that enable the viewer to question and challenge their preconceptions about what one sees and experiences. Beyond the initial concept, movement, text, images, film and sound are then thrown into the mix in an organic way, depending on the context and the nature of each project.
Déchery’s recent works include Useful Knowledge to Know (tour in England, Wales and France, 2010-2007), a lecture-performance devised in collaboration with Chris Eley; Showing up, a series of short performances devised for the Sprint festival in collaboration with Lucy Foster (Camden People’s Theatre, June 2009); Marie, a solo show exploring the complex relationship between mother and daughter through the mapping of the performer’s own body (Oval House, Forest Fringe, Corn Exchange, 2010 – 2009 and on-going).
Déchery has also been working with Anne Bean, Geraldine Pilgrim, Sheila Ghelani or Rajni Shah and regularly collaborates with Nomad Theatre Company.
She is a lecturer in Nanterre-University in Paris; she has taught workshops and published critical articles and essays in various magazines and books.
Déchery has performed in the UK; in London (BAC, Siobhan Davies Space, Toynbee Studios, Shunt, Oval House, Camden People’s Theatre), Bristol (Arnolfini), Edinburgh (Forest Fringe), Cambridge (Junction), Brighton, Oxford, Sheffield, Newbury, Aberystwyth – and in France; in Paris (Théâtre du Colombier, Théâtre Albatros, Théâtre du Jardin, Théâtre Bernard-Marie Koltès, festival ARIA in Corsica) and Estonia (Tartu University).
Chloé Déchery received funding from the Arts Council of England for the development of her new show Epic and for the touring of Useful Knowledge to Know (Autumn 2009). She has also been receiving on-going support from the Camden People’s Theatre and the Corn Exchange in Newbury through the Evolve Exchange Programme. In 2008/09, she was involved in Balloon, a peer-support group facilitated by Artsdmin and Oval House. The group, now known as Not Balloon, is still on-going.
Collaborations
Collaboration plays a major part in Chloé Déchery’s creative process and is conceived as on-going non-hierarchical dialogue; a way of nurturing a creative and responsible relationship where agreement and consensus are not always predominant.
Déchery regularly works with documentary film-maker Chris Eley, and, together, they have recently formed Moustache, a theatre and multimedia company. They are interested in collecting documents and raw material and turning them into poetic and performative objects. They try to observe and find the wonder in the daily life and ordinary environments – to make sense of what is apparently meaningless. Methodologies are being drawn from a combination of observation, investigation and the archiving process.
Chris Eley
Chris Eley is an Australian documentary film-maker. Since 2005, he has been working as an assistant producer and director at True Vision, one of the British Television’s most respected and award winning documentary producers. Eley recently won a BAFTA award as a producer on Chosen. His most recent film Into that Good Night was broadcast on Channel 4 in early December 2009 and was described by the Guardian as an “astonishing film”. Eley is currently working on a new Current Affair film for Channel 4.
He has also been involved in performance projects and has been creating video material, most recently for Lucy Foster’s Oh My Green Soapbox.
Other collaborators include:
Lucy Foster
Lucy Foster is an Associate Director with the theatre company Improbable, and the Co-Artistic Director of her own company Jumbled. She recently finished a run at The Barbican as a performer in Improbable’s new show, Panic, and completed a run of her solo show Oh My Green Soapbox at the Edinburgh Festival this summer.
“In my performances I explore how the simplest physical gestures can produce the most captivating performance. As a performer I am interested in the switch between appearing as myself on stage and loosely taking on a character. My shows often explore the playing out of certain rituals or tasks that are openly constructed and disassembled before the audience’s eyes. Storytelling is a key element of what I do, and the line between what is true and what is not is often played with. Basic materials and sets are often manipulated and transformed to create beautiful, yet simple, stage pictures.”
Pia Nordin
Pia Nordin was born in Sweden and arrived to England in 1996 to study at London Contemporary Dance School. She graduated in 1999 and since then she has worked extensively as a performer with a wide and varied range of choreographers and dance/theatre/circus companies in Sweden, Canada and UK, including Nomad Theatre, Dante or Die and Turner Dance. She also choreographs, gives workshops and teaches contemporary techniques to both dancers and actors.
Not Balloon
In 2008/2009, Chloé Déchery was involved in Balloon (now renamed Not Balloon), an artist-led and peer-support group facilitated by Artsadmin and Oval House, a still on-going project where artists from various artistic backgrounds meet regularly to show work, share feedback and invent new collaborative methodologies.
This group has recently decided to merge with the 2007 / 2008 Balloon group to develop as a proper collective, meeting on a regular basis.
Current participants include: Nicola Conibere, Carlos Cortes, Chloé Déchery, Ellen Duckenfield, Lucy Foster, Taylan Halici, Rachel Oxley, Mamoru Iriguchi, Tim Jeeves, Elyssa Livergant, Catherine Long and Melody Vic.