The Company

Each production created by the Arcosm company reflects a desire to bring together strong personalities and universes. Since the company was founded in Lyon in 2001, the choreographer Thomas Guerry surrounded himself with a team whose constellation is defined by each project, motivated by artistic encounters and supported by fruitful collaborations around common themes. Dancers, set designers, musicians, directors, actors and costume designers work together to create a poetic universe where dance enters into dialogue with other art forms.

Driven by a real curiosity and a thirst to renew the relationship with spectators, Arcosm uses a variety of tools: singing, text, dance, music, mime, acting, the body is taken as a whole. Physical dance, work with the voice, expressiveness, body theatre, Arcosm’s dance is thus nourished by several sources and renews its vocabulary over time. Thomas Guerry’s work makes the musicians dance or the dancers speak, blurring the lines and developing over time a vocabulary specific to the company’s productions.

If Thomas Guerry likes to use a theme as a basis for his work, like resilience and failure (Bounce! 2013), our relationship to the image (Sublime and Subliminal 2015 and 2016), or going beyond the logical sense (Sens, creation 2018), he seeks in writing to initiate a common creative ground. His work willingly allows itself to be humorous, engaging protrusions on the burlesque side, often to better illuminate the melancholic part of our ways of being. With eight shows to its credit, the company has developed as many variations on the human condition, without fear of questioning gravity with a hint of self-derision.

After having extensively explored the relationship between music and dance since the creation of Echoa in 2001, the company continues on its journey while questioning its fundamentals. To open new imaginations, to continue to surprise and venture into new territories, carried by the values that are the foundation of its identity. Sens, created in 2018, will be the first milestone in this desire to revisit its signature rooted in the music-dance-theatre alliance. Disrupting the course of things with spirit, playing with imbalance, surprise and the unexpected within a framed writing, imagining a world based on strong scenographic elements are as many guidelines that guide Arcosm’s work. Between dreamlike theatre and danced reverie, each play is driven by a communicative energy and an expressive universe that appeals to the spectator, big or young.