SEARCH FRANCE/QUEBEC

Listening to objects - Developing technology-craft sound assemblies in the service of new relational imaginaries

  • By : Cie La Boîte à sel - France / Groupe FORMES - Québec
  • Creation : 2025/2027
Season Calendar

2025 Award-winning Project of the call for projects Research in theater and associated arts from the DGCA - General Directorate of Artistic Creation.

The performing arts have historically been attached to the centrality of the human figure. Very little considered in the history of theater, the objects on stage and their performativity remain a blind spot in critical reflections on the anthropocentrism of this artistic discipline. We believe that the arts of puppetry and the field of technological tinkering constitute fertile areas of reflection on the place, role, and transformative power of objects and materials on performances and imaginations.

We wish to question certain processes and conventions of puppet theater, object theater, and, more generally, animated forms, in light of what the makeshift technological assemblies invented by Thomas Sillard, sound artist, allow us to create in terms of agency, real or imagined, of objects on stage. By listening to the behavior of these objects, we will question the traditionally maintained relationships between humans and other presences (robotic agents, sound sculptures, technological devices, etc.) in the performance space.


Supports

Photos

Videos

Team
  • Dinaïg Stall - Researcher - University of Quebec in Montreal / Quebec > Dinaïg Stall is a puppeteer, professor at the École supérieure de théâtre (UQAM, Montreal), director of FORMES – Research-Creation Group on Puppet Forms and Processes, and a member of several feminist research groups. 
  • Céline Garnavault - Director - actress - puppeteer / France > Céline Garnavault is an actress, puppeteer, author, director, and artistic director of Cie La Boîte à sel. She teaches contemporary shadow theater in the L1 Performing Arts program at Bordeaux-Montaigne University and supports master's students in IPCI in their research modules on the participation of children and young people in cultural projects.
  • Julie Michèle Morin - Researcher - University of Quebec in Montreal / Quebec > Julie-Michèle Morin is completing a doctorate in the Department of French Language Literatures at the University of Montreal as well as at the University of Antwerp, where she conducts research on robotics in live arts. Julie-Michèle employs a techno-feminist approach to reflect on the political issues raised by the intersection of the arts, digital cultures, and technoscientific devices. 
  • Emma Mérabet - Researcher - Passages XX-XXI Laboratory - University Lyon 2 / France > Doctor in Letters and Arts and A.T.E.R. in performing arts and live performance. "Decentering the human on contemporary stages: dramaturgical mutations and ecopoetic perspectives." Since 2015, she has dedicated her research to contemporary aesthetics that, at the crossroads of theatrical, visual, and choreographic writings, attempt to reactivate a concrete, poetic, and ecological connection to matter.
  • Thomas Sillard - Sound Artist / France > Thomas Sillard is a sound artist and director of technological and artistic creation at Cie La Boîte à sel, fully dedicating himself to research and creation to dream of interactions, reciprocities, new logics, and invent new techno-hacked forms in which the spectator is at the center, immersed, with the body engaged, the senses stimulated, on and in the stage, in sculpture, in sound.
  • Nicolas Guichard - Mechanotrician / France > Nicolas Guichard builds and develops electronic and mechanical devices for live performance and digital art. He works as a designer and technician for companies and digital artists, notably with Thomas Garnier, where he develops the installations "cenotaph," "chimera," “taotie," and "logistikon." In 2019, he joined LABLAB in Villeurbanne, where he designs, develops, and continues his research on different types of robotic installations.
  • Luka Merlet - Videographer - France > Luka Merlet is a visual artist, graduated from the Bordeaux School of Fine Arts in 2017, he turns, among other things, to the making of documentary films. Interested in conveying unique experiences to the public, he seeks to create immersive films, handheld camera, that reflect the complexity of the practices and subjects he addresses, as well as the research-creation processes at work.

Production
  • Compagnie La Boîte à sel - Bordeaux 
  • Research group [FORMES] - UQAM - Université du Québec à Montréal / Québec
  • 2025 Laureate of the call for projects Research in theater and associated arts from the DGCA - General Directorate of Artistic Creation
  • L’Hectare, National Center for Puppetry of Vendôme
  • L’Espace Jéliote, National Center for Puppetry of Oloron Sainte Marie
  • DRAC Nouvelle Aquitaine