Bitef

want. First of all, we expand the core of three into a larger company with a mixed technical, artistic and organisational background: people who as yet have little or no experience with this work. We divide important tasks: from now on we work with an office staff of two and a full-time technician. We outline a number of strategies: Working just below our capacity instead of above it, so that there is a reserve, and this gives us a chance to take a breather and to think about the best way of organising the work. Doing less performances; each time reserving time for preparations, and playing longer series on one site if necessary. Reintroducing the principle of artistic alternation; varying the kind of work in different periods spectacles, concerts, infiltrations, occasional celebratory performances, or street performances. We now construct the large-scale performances in a different way from before. We used to start by outlining a sequence of acts, and then filling in what we would do. Now we start with a division into groups of players (an orchestra, stage assistants and two rival groups of leading characters). Only then do we proceed to determine the course of tne action. So we have reversed the relationship between »what happens« and »who does something«. In addition, we rarely think in acts any more: a piece is a reality of its own as a whole, and the unusual inventions support that reality almost

incidentally, instead of functioning like the climaxes of a circus act. All our earlier performances consisted of independent, smaller elements. The reality we are making now is a continuum; a landscape that invites the audience to share in a dream. In the large-scale performances during the first years of this period (1 986 and 1 987) we still follow the same general outline. The »stage« is usually an elipse in which the two foci are territories belonging to two parties which are involved in a struggle with one another. Each of them builds its own world and disrupts the other's world. The audience watches this closed world from outside. We develop new material for each project; we swap roles and use the surroundings of the performance in a different way each time. Since 1 989 we have been presenting spectacles on every conceivable site and in every conceivable form. We put on performances on the water with floating machines; we play for a large audience scattered among a network of small alleys, without having a fixed stage of our own; we do a performance with two cranes on a sixty by ten metre stretch of street. In 1 989 we perform at the Festival of Aurillac - the only festival where all the companies like ours come. »The big surprise«, write the major French dailies Le Monde and Liberation. We are productive: twenty different projects a year, and one or two new elements per company member per project. ■