The Keruzha company emerged in 2011 from Jany Pons Ballester’s work: pure song and intuition compelled her to work a capella, without trappings or trimmings of any kind.
The naked voice as a call to search, a means of exploration.
In 2012 Jany met a dancer, Zilda Barthès, and the two joigned forces.
Through their work, they soon discovered how and where a cappella singing and dance become one, where meaning blossoms. They found common ground in wordless forms and encounters that would be accessible to all.
On this basis the first three performances were developed: not simply recitals, but movements—narratives, from and of the body.
But there was still something missing. Jany sought out Catherine Lippinois and Fanny de Rauglaudre, visual artists whose work opened new frontiers of the imagination and enabled the further development of her goal to connect with the senses through physical embodiment and presence. This fostered the founding of the company in 2015.
Keruzha is founded on a desire to break down the boundaries between the classical, the traditional, and the contemporary. Through poetic material, the company presents performances on the themes of encounter, the other, difference, and presence. It takes a minimal approach to staging that cuts across cultural boundaries and artistic disciplines while remaining grounded in the body and non-verbal forms.
The company’s repertoire includes several performances developed as invitations to travels, to paths of sensorial and poetic exploration fed on the curiosity, on the reflection, and on the care to other.
In an intimate atmosphere, full of impressive scenes and emotions, they lead to (re)discover landscapes both real and imaginary, familiar and alien, from Europe and the Mediterranean.
Propelled by a repertoire which covers twenty centuries and thirty languages, the company focuses to share narratives where time is arrested so as to better open senses: sensations, directions, and significations.
The Company developed:
- Shores, roots, sceneries: a journey through history of breath, body and built, from the fourth century to the twentieth
- The one giving: giving thought to the yes and the no
- Memories of clay: the Epic of Gilgamesh lying at the root of the mediterranean cultures
- Sororities: Beguines— an other story of women's empowerment and freedom
- Katarekuna: lullabies from Europe and the Mediterranean, to welcome the young and raise up the old
Small-scale performances with singing and visual arts, often exploration tools and basis for future performances, complete the repertory:
- Songs and Stories of Cliffs: on both sides of the Atlantic, on both sides of the Equator
- Songs of Shores: mediterranean east and west
- Songs and Stories of Journeys: Ladinos, Rroms, Berber, Yiddish, weaved in and out cultures and following their thread
- Songs and Stories of Waters: memoirs of the Dordogne in twelve tables
Performances are upcoming:
- Because (the rose is without why): manifesto for the water the being and the becoming
- Infa(n)cing— sharing sounds and words with two children, small ones or older, and much more, a mosaic of mingled stories, to say: Listen, what is resisting? And repeating? And remaining child, headwind, facing closed languages? And more, standing, tenir, up in the chaos when all around is collapsing?
And collective creations open the creative labour:
- Exile(s): from hearth from earth and from the living, dizzinesses and vitality, three letters and three chants
- Brundibar or The So Big Bad Noise: a slamed, sound and sung version of the children's opera of Hans Krása
- Welcome><s : in Hopscothland... also in other versions; by the company Rouletabille "Welcomexs immersive exhibition" in Pays de l'Isle, and by the company Le Corps Sage "Welcoming oneself is not a luxury!" in Pays d'Albret
- and an upcoming project "Tell me about peace?"
To date, we have given almost 420 recitals of these different performances.
Parallel performances for social welfare audiences have opened up these experiences to the vulnerable and oft–neglected publics.
The artistic approach, at the beginning for all audiences, went through successive meetings toward specific audiences then toward mixed audiences, without making any difference but rather to expand the boundaries of the common humanity possible.
We prefer smaller audiences, which allow our work with the body and the breath to be in close proximity to audience members.
Through the breath, word, song, and the use of space, we hope to permit the gesture its full range of imaginal expression. This gives it the wholeness needed for real listening and powerful sensory experience.
This all remains a means of searching. For, as the Roma proverb goes, "a candle is not made of wax, but is all flame".
