Valentina Barone: Before talking of Le Bruit des Pierres, could you give me a glimpse of Maison Courbe as a collective?

Nina Harper: Maison Courbe is a collective structure created in 2021 to support the artistic projects of Inbal Ben Haim, Léo Manipoud, Nina Harper, Domitille Martin and Kamma Rosenbeck. As young artists with circus and visual arts backgrounds, we met on shows combining different languages (with Cie Libertivore, Cie l’Attraction and IDEM Collectif, among others), and decided to build this shared house to host our projects. 

Sometimes, it is necessary to be together to discuss ideas, support, confront, and help each other during our singular experiences. A mutual structure allows you to mutualise funding and share reflections on creating something together, but that can grow in different directions. We also care about the mental health conditions around artistic creation and think about how to bring more joy and health inside the career of a circus artist, an aspect which is not on the spot and easy to deal with all the time. These factors connect us and are similarly visible in our pieces.

We have been close friends for a long time, and were at a similar point in our careers: we wanted to manage our projects directly but did not want to create a single company for each of us. Maison Courbe represents a landing point, a common base in Grenoble, where we are associate artists at the TMG – Grenoble.

Domitille Martin: We share the same values and a similar attitude to aesthetics in mixing live and visual arts, with a vivid curiosity around installation and ecological sustainability while touring. We are currently working on three diverse projects. Sometimes, we collaborate for workshops, ateliers, or carte blanche, because the transmission aspect is also pivotal to us. At the core, there is a specific interest in questioning how to heal the relationship between humans and natural matter. 

There is a palpable link between what we create and what we care about. And I think it’s just really connected to the environment, with the situation we are in as a species, and reconnecting with nature and being part of something. It also intuitively presents the idea of merging personal and planetary caring. This aspect is part of our message and what we are trying to say.

The collective house can have different branches, and in that sense, it is a rhizomatic structure able to adapt or extend its limit to include other people for various projects. It is an open structure with fixed artists who invite others to participate. For Le Bruit des Pierres the authorial team includes Ricardo as an invited artist. 

VB: What are the origins of Le Bruit des Pierres, how did the three of you meet and start to collaborate on this project?  

Nina Harper: Domitille and I met for the first time in 2015 in Paris, while I was at the Académie Fratellini and she was studying decorative arts. We started to spend some time in the studio together to research how to suspend Domitille’s sculptures, and how I could interact with these spaces and transform them through my interaction. Domitille had previously spent a year living in Brazil for a school exchange and I was born in Brazil, so even at the beginning of our friendship, the natural element, the presence of nature, the tropical forest, was already there. Brazil is a very specific place. It gave us the impulse to make things happen. It is a country with strong contradictions, it has had a huge impact on our lives. It has such an amazing and strong nature and, is also, a geo-political and economic place with such strong contradictions that have a lot of impact on our lives and this work. When we met, we started to suspend her installations, and I went to transform this space. Hanging on different, unusual support was very liberating for me. I admire artists who work for a long time to develop their own vocabulary in a single apparatus, but I never really enjoyed spending years and years trying to find different figures using that same one.

So, it was very satisfying for me to open up and work with different supports. We were already attracted by natural elements, working with plants, stones, ropes, plastic… any kind of material. During one laboratory we suspended the stones, noticing that we were touched by the image of strong objects suspended with thin ropes. The contrast of the heaviness with the light suspension was intriguing and reminded us of the principle of the Damocles sword, a very threatened object which can fall at any time. As a symbol, it was very powerful, and we started to notice how impressive it was to lie under it because it looked like it was hanging in such a fragile way.

As suspended apparatus, I found stones incredibly interesting. Since they are not aerial tissues or ropes which can be adapted to your body, the principle is the opposite, it is always you who has to find a way to adapt. They are not going to change, you can’t break them, or force them to do whatever you want, you are obliged to respect their shapes as they are, with their strongness, their weight, their relief. Every stone is different from another, and even on the ground, dancing with them, and feeling their weight, there were aspects that instantly engaged my body to collaborate. 

Domitille Martin: Among all the materials we found, the strongest image we kept in mind was the suspended stones. It was a starting point, that crucial moment of the instant just before a fall in which we can imagine many stories. Many years later, we decided to apply to the Croisements / Cruzamentos in 2022, a research residency programme in Brazil and France. Ricardo and Nina already knew each other. We were selected, and that allowed us to continue our research. Thanks to this application, we had two months of residency, one in Brazil and one in France. It was the perfect opportunity to meet again.

VB: Ricardo, what is your role in the team, and how did your adventure inside this artistic process start? 

Ricardo Cabral: Nina and I have been in contact for more than ten years, and because of this double residency programme between Grenoble and Rio de Janeiro, we reconnected to work together. At that time, I was at the beginning of my PhD at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, and my research was exploring how performing arts can collaborate with collective organisations and ecosystems in order to proliferate more life while the sky is falling. This concept is dear to us as expressed in the book The Falling Sky, written by the Amazon indigenous shaman Davi Kopenawa, from the Yanomami people, together with a French anthropologist with whom he has had a friendship for over thirty years, Bruce Albert.

At the beginning of our artistic trajectory, we were asking ourselves basic but relevant questions. How are humans different from stones, and how can we perceive stones as forms of living, as minerals are fundamental components for the whole ecosystem? Through the differences between humans and stones, what can we do together? If we engage in a physical relationship with them, what can we learn about our way of being human? The pivotal point was mostly the idea to start creating relationships with other forms of living.

In the intricate and fascinating Yanomami cosmology, there is a correspondence between what lives above us, the sky, and the minerals deeply rooted in the ground. The sky above our heads is anchored on the earth by huge mineral structures. 

So if we continue to tear up the ground to extract copper, petrol, silver, or whatever mineral we want to use and sell, we are damaging the structures of our planet. That’s what we have been doing historically for centuries, and once the sky falls, we are all going to die.

This idea influenced our creation deeply. Suddenly, stones and minerals were no longer immobile still-life objects with business value; they were not unanimated things anymore. Their silent presence became incredibly powerful. This principle caught our attention and helped us understand the significance of suspending stones in the air. 

Le Bruit des Pierres is about collaborating with stones to experiment a poetical and political human-mineral alliance. Which relations to rocks may we imagine, beyond mining for precious gems or exploiting mountains for microelectronics?

VB: Nina, as a circus performer, what did you discover from creating the interaction with the stones as apparatus? 

Nina Harper: For me, circus is a place where you can experience a state of metamorphosis and create a dialogue, a way to get closer to nature, to empathise with flat hierarchies and other bodies, animals, matter, not-so-vertical hierarchies, or non-binary bodies.

I’m still discovering how circus through this practice is shaping my gestures and choreography. Working with big stones made me ask myself how far I could go and how much weight to take. It is a balance of responsibility. In one scene, I let this giant stone roll on my chest, and it was interesting to figure out how much I needed to go against it, to protect myself, and how much I needed to give in to its weight. You need to find a balance to be able to move with it. Stones taught me a lot about humbleness. I live the danger disseminated on stage as a game to play, a challenge to realize how far I can adapt, control or release control. 

During our last residency, this was our main paradoxical question: since we created a space that asks for a lot of adaptation, how can we get rid of the sensation of feeling blocked by the stones’ presence? If you think about it, this is a perfect metaphor for the world we are living in. We feel blocked because we need to create innovative ways of being in connection. On the other hand, being able to control the risk is one of the main principles of circus, and at the same time you want to give place to the unknown, it is always a thin negotiation, especially while working with stones as apparatus.

VB: Scenographically speaking, the stage space seems like an extended moving sculpture placed in front of the audience. How did the rigging element come in, and what has been its influence while shaping your show?

Domitille Martin: The main principle with the rigging is to keep visible the relationship between the air and the ground. To recreate the relation between the ground and the sky, we hung stones with ropes to the theatre grill and other big ones on the ground with thin ropes. This correspondence creates an interdependent ecosystem because if you alter the position of a stone connected to the ceiling, you affect another one on the ground. You don’t know how you feel in an unstable environment, capable of falling without knowing exactly when. In the creation, we discovered that the falling of stones was as curious as their suspension and decided to show this moment of collapsing and destruction. 

Resonating with the residency places has been very useful. In Brazil, the energy of a dismantled theatre where we could let rocks fall on the ground resulted in creativity for our scenographic research. The piece speaks about suspension and collapsing: there is something about being on the ground, falling and being suspended, as a reflection of the relationship Nina and I have, she as a performer, me as a visual artist.  

On stage we don’t want to hide all the techniques involved and show only the magical element. Our use of the materials is very raw, we use real stones, and we show the ropes. We suspend and move the stones using their movement to produce sounds. We want to communicate their qualities by revealing some technical aspects, but not all of them. On the contrary, you can also see very weird things happening, because we have rocks you can eat, and others that look heavier or lighter than you think. There is a little bit of a distortion in our proposition. 

Ricardo Cabral: At the beginning, we attempted to work with local stones at each performance and then take them back to where we had found them, but then we realised it was too complicated for Nina to adapt her movements and even for our scenography. Since our creation is centred on revealing the relationship between humans and stones and started as an immersive performance, it feels relevant to mention that in an earlier stage, the environment welcoming the audience was one without any separation between the stage and the public. We then gave up on this immersive structure since we understood that the audience could feel the stones’ presence, even without touching them. 

Nina Harper: We decided to go back to a black box format and created distance between the audience and the stones to facilitate the rigging suspension in different venues. This separation raises the perception of risk and the fragile quality of each suspension while, at the same time, allowing us to protect the spectators. It was too dangerous to position people under the suspended rocks. 

VB: At what point in your creative process did you engage with the possibility of applying for circusnext?

Domitille Martin: It happened at the beginning of our activities as Maison Courbe. We researched for two months and started working on the piece after only three weeks of writing. For Le Bruit des Pierres, circusnext has been a new beginning. Being selected happened with great timing. Going into creation mode with a concrete proposition and a deadline helps you not get lost. 

The team of circusnext is hearty. I love their way of being involved in circus and how they get engaged with the artists. We met many other artists from other countries, and it was enriching to share what we were constructing for the show and to test it. This moment of visibility was great for us. We had the opportunity to share a piece of the show and felt strongly supported.

Ricardo Cabral: When applying to circusnext, we were aware that we had a bold and scary proposition. Imagine writing that your first project is an international collaboration involving 500 kilos of stones and their transportation! So, circusnext is actually the kind of label that supports bold projects, even when unknown, because they see the potential of your idea. It was a big bet, but we used it to keep going. 

VB: Who are the collaborators helping you in developing the show? 

Nina Harper: We had some people in specific moments helping us as a mirror, and that was also interesting because we got involved with very different aesthetics. We worked with Tristan Garcia as a dramaturgical advisor, Fragan Gehlker and Léo Manipoud, who come from circus, and Gaël Santisteva, more physical theatre and performance, as artistic advisors, and Sandra Ancelot, from the visual arts. She helped us develop the presence of Domitille, who has a different kind of body, presence, and gestures than a circus performer. It has been helpful to receive the help of someone sensitive to defy and value these differences.

Martin Domitille: The show contains a big mix of different sounds, natural sound compositions and pre-recorded sounds on stage before the performance. The music is by Nova Materia, a Chilean-French duo from Paris experimenting with soundscapes from natural materials like stones. They came to visit during some residencies, recorded Nina’s movements and interactions with various props in their atelièr, and composed the tracks. Recently, another sound designer, Timothée Langlois, has been helping us with pre-recording the ambient stage sounds used during the performance. What is important for us is to create a good balance between the sounds from the stage you can hear live and the pre-recorded ones.

VB: What’s next and what are you learning from Le Bruit des Pierres? 

Nina Harper: We are dealing with an exciting time! We finished a residency at La Cascade to write the main lines of the piece, add the details of each scene, and work with the lighting designer Marie Sol Kim. Ricardo is also coming from Brazil to finalise the piece with us and our première is at the TMG – Grenoble in the middle of March. 

Ricardo Cabral: There is something incredibly satisfying that we have been doing these last two years, and that is learning how to work together as co-authors. In theatre – where I come from, usually only one person is directing. Co-creating is not easy, it needs time and discussions, like carrying stones, you can’t be just by yourself. And I do not take it for granted. I think we have learned how to do it, using the energy to take us in the right direction, and this is the expertise I am proud of and something I’m taking from this experience with me into every future project.