Antoine Defoort & Halory Goerger

If Halory Goerger and Antoine Defoort strew their plays with more or less elaborate jokes, they are never free, but always cost something. The incongruity of the situations they stage comes from a subtle strategy of friction between lightness and philosophy, casualness and seriousness. Their experiences are in line with the realm of theatre but, as they themselves admit, this is a bit of a coincidence. Plastic artists and do-it-yourselfers of objects and concepts, trained in the late 1990s in fine arts for one and in information science for the other, they take hold of all the materials available to them, without any hierarchy, recycle them and reposition them to produce shows somewhere between lectures, performance and fiction. Human and social sciences nourish their creations and, if the duo brilliantly handles irony and derision, it also demonstrates a very painstaking rigour and takes a strong stance against boredom. The two artists are cofounders of Amicale de production, a structure halfway between a company and a production agency, a cooperative straddling the visual arts and the performing arts, bringing together technicians, administrators and artists who gather and collaborate depending on the projects. It is in this framework that they created, together, in  2008, &&&&& & &&&, a show and an exhibition dealing with “science, fiction, and the two of them linked by a hyphen”. With Julien Fournet, Antoine Defoort took part in the Festival d'Avignon in 2010 in the framework of the 25th Hour with Horse, presented as an “abstract treatise on the ricochet”. He is returning this year, with Halory Goerger and a proposal that is perhaps more similar to Flaubert's Bouvard et Péchuchet than Zola's novel, or perhaps not.

RB, April 2013.