Au jardin des Potiniers

Flowers open, thunder booms, birds sing and the audience sits right in the middle of the action, with their heads in the middle of a garden full of surprises both large and small. They each experience the world from the perspective of a rock inside this lovingly detailed pop-up landscape – right in front of their noses. As if guided by ghostly hands, the fictional plants in this microcosm come to life, they grow, reproduce and fade. And the audience immerse themselves in this living installation, this world between illusion and reality that offers them an intense experience of the natural course of events and beauty of nature in the unnatural setting of a brightly-coloured stage landscape. This piece of object theatre was created in an unprecedented collaboration.

The French-Belgian company Ersatz is an interdisciplinary collective that works in the visual arts, installation and illustrated books. The group’s artistic approach has evolved out of the common ground between the different professions of its members; illustrator Pierre Mercier, sound designer Noam Rzewski, lighting designer Léonard Cornevin and theatre director and dramaturg Camille Panza. Together with the Quebec theatre company Création Dans la Chambre, whose work focusses on exploring intimacy in unconventional surroundings, in Au jardin des Potiniers they have created a fantasy universe that presents the beauty of the world in all its vulnerability and poetry in tangible form. Moments filled with wonder and humour remind us of our planet’s fragility. A performance that playfully makes children aware of the environment and offers adults food for thought.