No dark room; no red seats. The KTHA company’s creations are designed to be discovered in the public arena, outside the theatre. An artistic and political act through which we see the city in a different light. Here, in his studio in Paris’ 20th arrondissement, we meet Nicolas Vercken, author and director of this intimate street theatre.

L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui: (us), one of your latest creations, receives an audience of around forty people in a small open-air mobile arena. En///chaîne is an installation designed on the scale of a neighbourhood. Your show est-ce que le monde sait qu’il me parle? is performed in a container, at the heart of the public space. Why do you choose to leave the traditional theatre for streets, car parks, roundabouts, ring roads and even rooftops?

Nicolas Vercken : The black box of the traditional theatre is just one of many creative frameworks. It could even be deemed rather anecdotal and tardy when we look at the history of plays as a whole. Why restrict ourselves? In the ktha company, we quickly discovered a shared intuition that it was absurd to want to isolate ourselves from the world in order to talk about it. The city is the place where we, and so many others, live: performing here allows us to reach a more diverse audience than in a traditional theatre, because the public space is a meeting place, a place of interaction where we really do live together. As artists, it’s essential for us to open the door, again and again, to what we do. The street also represents a dramaturgical opening. Without the constraints of a building and stage, along with the traditional front-end relationship with the public, the notion of the audience reinvents itself. Within the company, we’ve experienced this movement from the theatre to the urban space as a liberation, allowing us to explore a new theatrical dimension.

Click on the image below to read the full interview.

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This article written by Christelle Granja was published in AA’s 432nd issue – Heritage and innovation – available in book shops and on our online store.