Biography
The Petit Travers collective was founded in 2004. Since 2011, its artistic direction has been set jointly by Nicolas Mathis and Julien Clément, who trained at Cirque Plume as children and then, respectively, at France’s National Centre for Circus Arts (CNAC) and Le Lido circus school. The company focuses chiefly on producing and performing large-format juggling pieces and on educational outreach. In the space of 18 years they have built up a repertoire of eight pieces, one creation for amateurs and four short forms, which have clocked up more than 1,000 performances worldwide. On the way, there have been defining encounters with leading figures from dance (Pina Bausch, Maguy Marin, Joseph Nadj), circus (Jérôme Thomas) and music (Sébastien Daucé, Pierre Jodlowski). Some of these encounters have turned into collaborations, crystallising the open-minded approach that has informed their juggling compositions since day one. Now based in Villeurbanne, the collective also carry out a wide range of artistic interventions to share the various facets and singularities of their juggling. Through demanding formats tailored to various audiences, these workshops draw on a vast spectrum of practices, devised during the company’s existence and productions. The collective’s jugglers regularly do outreach work in schools and in training centres for future professionals. Each member of the company has cutting-edge know-how in the fields of circus, musical composition or dance; and each of them strives to be receptive to the others’ practices. Rich individual questioning entails reaching out to the diversity of the other voices. The work requires the courage of solitude, and as a group they try to inhabit these solitudes with their own experiences. Each discipline penetrates the others’ territories with its own questions, thus setting the collective’s juggling apart in the galaxy of the performing arts.