Décrochez-moi-ça

About the show

Décrochez-moi ça offers a unique and intimate circus experience, bringing you up close to the performers. After touring France and Europe for about ten years, with nearly 700 performances, the poetic quartet Bêtes de Foire is performing under a big top specially erected inside TOHU. In a circular arena with a suspended set, clumsiness and feats of skill, little things and the extraordinary come together to create a unique, timeless, and dreamlike world. A show where the audience finds itself at the heart of the action, caught between appearances, pretense, and the magic of the circus. Come and live the experience!

About Bêtes de foire

“Bêtes de Foire” is the result of a collaboration between Laurent Cabrol, a circus artist, and Elsa De Witte, a costume designer and actress. After training under Annie Fratellini and Lan N’Guyen, Laurent co-founded the circuses Convoi Exceptionnel and Trottola, while forging numerous artistic collaborations: with Raphaelle Delaunay, Cirque Romanes, and Théâtre du Rugissant, where he reunited with Elsa. She comes from a background in street theater companies—notably Cie Babylone—and cultivates her love for simple, popular stories, while deepening her work on repurposing used materials, which she recycles and embellishes.

Their first show, “Bêtes de foire—petit théâtre de gestes,” premiered in 2013 and brought together all their expertise to create a performance with a unique world: elements of the circus, through its tragic emotion and the disciplines performed; elements of puppetry and object theater, through characters manipulated in full view; and elements of dance, through the body language created by movement—all infused with the gestures and sensibility of silent film. This show received the SACD Prize for Circus Arts in 2015 and has been performed no fewer than 700 times in France and across Europe.

For “Decrochez-moi-ça,” the team is growing with several partners. First, there's Bastien Pelenc and Thomas Barriere, 20 years of collaboration in cinema-concerts, documentary theater, their duo Algecow, street and dance performances, film music, sound poetry, and also with Cirque Trottola. The musician duo constantly explores and fine-tunes their instrumental practice, balancing physical skill, timbral polyphony, and graceful gestures combined with precise sound. For “Decrochez-moi-ça,” they compose the music together, which they then take turns performing. Next up is Stéphane Laisne, replacing Simon Rosant. He handles live technical operations during the show.

For this performance, Bêtes de foire continues with touring and its radiant menagerie, extends its exploration of the distortion of time and creative processes, and reconnects with the central ring, the circus's anchor point.