Les Karyatides
The Caryatids are sculpted columns, motionless women made of stone, the carriers of doors, lintels and balconies.
Les Karyatides is a very much living theatre company, carried by two women made of flesh, bone and ideas: Karine Birgé and Marie Delhaye.
At their instigation, other actors are now taking part in the adventure – creatives and partners, caryatids and atlases, accomplices in a joint work which speaks to the young and old alike, to dreamers as much as to thinkers. Together, they build stories the way one raises columns: with precision and a touch of irreverence.
he Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again
Les Karyatides adapts the monuments of literature and repertoire.
It grabs a tight hold of powerful stories and writings, opens them, unfolds them and shapes them, before squeezing and extracting exhilarating, striking digests from them, fragments polished until they sparkle.
They restore to the myths and old stories their topicality, or rather their timelessness, going back in time to read the future in them and bring us face to face with the present.
The way an acid bites into an etching.
Un langage : le théâtre d’objet
This object theatre, which they also like to call figure theatre, combines the re-examined text, a finely crafted soundtrack, the handling of gleaned objects and puppets, the narration and acting embodied.
It is an art of the gap, of collage, of ellipsis and evocation, which plays with the sense of scale, blurs the references and redefines the conventions.
A theatre which leaves no stone unturned – or any scrap of plastic or metal – and which, within its modest resources, permits itself spectacular effects.
Le théâtre d’objet apparaît comme le porte-drapeau d’un art en résistance, plus contemporain que jamais, qui est à la culture ce que le recyclage ou le slow food sont à nos modes de vie : un modeste et grandiose pas de côté.
Minimalist, but monumental
This theatre adores contrast. Behind the delicate objects and the small forms they handle are hidden vast ideas, entire universes. Behind the economy of means, a profuse richness where each gesture, each element, expands to unveil an entire world. A world which questions, critiques and shakes up the social, political and cultural issues of today, whilst positioning us in front of the paradoxes of our era.
The Karyatides theatre is a theatre with effects inversely proportional to its minimalism
Karine Birgé
Karine was born in 1977 in the Lorraine mists, on this land which still bears the scars of the war. As a child, she played alongside the railway line and in the bunkers, collecting the still buried helmets and shells, or else walked Lola, her goat, alongside the main road.
She grew a little and drifted into university studies. She dreamed of being in a hard-rock band. One evening, she took the train to Paris. There she roamed the bars, restaurants, but behind the counter, not in front of it, or occasionally only.
On another evening, she migrated to Belgium to study for a few years at the Liège Royal Conservatory and in Brussels, where she settled. There she worked for several theatre companies, played a few minor roles for the cinema, made documentary films and above all: she founded the Karyatides company with Marie Delhaye.
Marie Delhaye
Born in 1978, Marie spent a peaceful childhood on the banks of the Saloum river, in Senegal, then untroubled teenage years beside the Béthune canal (Pas-de-Calais). There followed history studies alongside the Deûle river, in Lille. Abandoning the capital H of major History, she instead subsequently developed a passion for stories, with a small s.
It triggered emigration to Belgium, her adopted home, where each day she would cross the Meuse River to make her way to the Liège Royal Conservatory. Water continued to flow under the bridges before she took off for Brussels, her degree tucked into the pocket of her puffa jacket, to try her luck there.
After studies at the Liège Conservatory, a few experiences involving creation and companies and meeting Agnès Limbos of the Gare Central object theatre company, she co-founded the Karyatides with Karine Birgé.
