Shows and events suitable for non-French Speakers

Am Stram Gram Theatre is a place for all. Beeing located in the international city of Geneva, we wish to adress also the non-French speakers. We are happy to present below several events and shows suitable for non-French speakers in the next season. Don't hesitate to call us for more information (Tél 022 735 79 24). We will be happy to answer your questions in French, in English as well as in Spanish. The complete season (in French) : SAISON 13/14 Please don't hesitate to either ask for the season book by phone 022 735 79 24. We will send it to you by post as soon as possible.

Friday, December the 20th at 7 p.m. Le Loto poétiqueAfter the amazing success of its first year, this is the second year of the Poetry Bingo at the Am Stram Gram Theatre! Our format is already being copied around Europe. Our idea has been nicked! Oh well, never mind, we don’t mind sharing. Hold your own Poetry Bingos wherever you like! In the countryside, in the town, in Rome, Berlin, Paris, London! But the original, the real McCoy of the poetry bingos is right here with us!Who hasn’t dreamt of winning the prime steak, the toaster, or the leg of cured ham? Who doesn’t want to yell “Bingo!” or “Full card!” when the big sums come up? Who hasn’t whispered to the master of ceremonies “Hey, windmill arms, it’s always the same numbers coming up!”. The Am Stram Gram Poetry Bingo is a bingo in our age-old tradition. Yes, you have to lay out your cards with your favourite numbers on them. Yes, you have to put those little four-leaf clovers onto the numbers chosen at random and fill in your lines or your cards before anyone one else so that you can get the words in play. But what can you win? Books, poems, special moments, theatre tickets, delicious surprises... You can even win the right to try out Jean-Baptiste’s drum kit at the end. And of course, of course, you could win, at the end, at the very end, you could win the JACKPOOOOOTTTTTTT! The bingo is appropriate for non-French speakers; we can speak very good English; también podemos hablar en castellan, o anche in italiano, und wir sprechen auch sehr gut Deutsch. an Am Stram Gram Production "Le Laboratoire Spontané" Tickets : adults 15 CHF, children (under 18) 12 CHF Reservations on +022 735 79 24

Friday, January the 10th at 7 p.m. La Street Party Slam poetry, which will soon be celebrating the grand old age of thirty, is the poetry of the slam-dunk. The hip-hop movement was born in the Bronx in the 1970s, but graffiti was already a commonplace on the walls of ancient Greece and Rome. These art-forms have always held themselves at arm’s length from the respectable institutions, but they have a long and rich history which we want to celebrate in fusing the disciplines, bringing together the languages and the craft. Last season Am Stram Gram had a roaring success with the first edition of The Street Party - it was a chance for Serval, Loc Nguyen and Latifa Djerbi, Rox and Jonas, Speaker B and Mans1, Bandi, Lil George and loads of others, to share the stage and create a joyous anthology of work that demonstrated the power of the Geneva “street” scene. That’s why Am Stram Gram has decided to invite back the graffiti artists, the hip-hop dancers, the slammers and rappers, with their acts of direct-graffiti, their poems slammed against the wall of sound and their pulsating songs... Because the most important thing is to dance until you drop, and sign your name at the bottom of the wall: I’m alive! With invited artists from Geneva and beyond. an Am Stram Gram Production "Le Laboratoire Spontané" Tickets : adults 15 CHF, children (under 18) 12 CHF Reservations on +022 735 79 24

From January the 17th to the 22th, 2014 Echoa Calling all children ! Boot your parents off the sofa and round up your gang of friends. Things are really kicking off around here! After more than 800 performances in over twenty countries around the world Echoa has arrived in Switzerland and it’s coming to Am Stram Gram. On stage there’ll be four artists, percussionists and dancers and clowns hammering down the walls dividing dance and music, inventing a new and totally unique language full of energy, fun and fantasy. There’s nothing you’ll have seen before in this fusion of dancers and musicians as each tries their hand at the art of the other: a noisy dancing and making noises dance! Echoa is the chance to discover the artistic journey of the company Arcosm lead by Thomas Guerry and Camille Rocailleux. It’s dance as you’ve never heard it and music as you’ve never seen it. “A highly original and generous musical and choreographic whirlwind that is both subtle and poetic. Exhilarating!” “Like a conversation between the bodies and the instruments which the dancers and musicians interweave with great delicacy, humour, freshness and simplicity [...]. They develop their formidable art effortlessly, blending their techniques with joy, sometimes with ingeniousness, and always to the astonishment of the spellbound public. In the theatre laughter follows stupefied silences.” (Source : Latest News from Alsace- DNA) Photos, vidéos and more information on Echoa Concept and direction: Thomas Guerry and Camille Rocailleux. Music: Camille Rocailleux. Choreography: Thomas Guerry Cast: Emmanuelle Gouiard and Thomas Guerry (dancers); Minh Tam Nguyen and Clément Ducol (percussionists). Lighting Design: Olivier Modol. Sound Design: Christian Hierro. Lighting Direction: Laurent Bazire. Sound Direction: Benoît Riot le Junter.

From February the 4th to the 9th, 2014 Cinématique You’re sitting comfortably, but you’re no longer really here. You’re existing in lots of different places at the same time. Immobile, you’re travelling across landscapes made of lines, dots, letters, and digital objects projected onto flat surfaces that weave together poetic, unexpected and unique surroundings. You’re dreaming. You’re playing with what you see and what you see plays with you. At the crossroads of digital arts, juggling and contemporary dance, come and discover the unique work of the company AM-CB. Your childhood will resurface with all its secrets, its moving images, its blurred connections and its thirst for freedom. Prepare to be astonished. Prepare to come back to life. And you won’t be able to get over it. The company Adrien M / Claire B creates new forms shifting between theatre and exhibition, associating the real and the virtual, with its own particular touch of the made-to-measure tools of information technology. Their work puts the human being and the body at the centre of the technological and artistic challenge putting the tools at the service of a timeless poetry and building and using a visual language based on play and pleasure as the imaginary support system. “I borrow from the circus its playfulness and the human stakes that are staged, from juggling I take the symbolism of danger, and from dance its abstraction; digital media is the only way I can do all of this.” (source : Adrien Mondot.) Photos, vidéos and more information on Cinématique Concept and Interpretation: Adrien Mondot. Dance (alternating): Satchie Noro and Akiko Kajihara. Music and Sound Design: Christophe Sartori and Laurent Buisson. Lighting Design: Elsa Revol. Dramaturgy: Charlotte Farcet. Information Technology Development Assistant: Alexis Lecharpentier. Sound Direction (alternating): Laurent Lechenault and Christophe Sartori. Lighting Direction: (alternating): Jérémy Chartier and Hervé Lonchamp. General Direction: Laurent Lechenault.

From 4th February to 15th April 2014 "Personnes" - installation de marionnettes Person(s) – Puppet installation “Since 2006 I’ve been making work in which actors share the stage with hyper-realist puppets, all of whom are, in the end, “fake people”. For Jon Fosse’s Kant, Maeterlinck’s The Blind, and Jon Fosse’s Violet, Marguerite Bordat and I designed 19 puppets of various sizes (from 1m20 to 2m15), which are the ones I have used for the exhibition "Person(s)". Visitors can stay for as long as they like to watch these people, to come up close to them and imagine what the link between them could possibly be, constructing a before and an after. "Person(s)" stages the immobile figures that are above all present in the consciousness of the spectator. The idea is that of the being in transformation, the being suspended between two states of being: immobility and movement, silence and the spoken word, childhood and adolescence, age and death. Our reality is never stable, from one day to the next, from one instant to the next, It is always relative and intangible. Each tableau presents a weightless figure. The elements surrounding the characters install a similar troubled relationship with reality: stuffed animals, fake birds, facsimiles of nature, a reconstructed child’s room.” (source : Bérangère Vantusso). Entrance free on theater opening days, places must be reserved on +022 735 79 24. From February to April 2014. Concept: Bérangère Vantusso and Marguerite Bordat. Sound Design: Aline Loustalot. Texts interpreted by the actors of the TNT Atelier Volant (class of 2013): Clément Durand, Gerôme Ferchaud, Jeanne Piponnier, Antoine Raffalli, Mathieu Tune, Sabine Zovighian. Set Construction: Stage Design Workshops of the TNT under the direction of Hubert Marty. The installation of Person(s) is co-produced by the National Theatre of Toulouse and the Company Trois-Six-Trente.

Saturday May 10th at 14h Spring Frozen Day To celebrate spring let’s stop, take a breath, look around, strike a pose and pause for a moment: It’s the Am Stram Gram Spring Frozen Day ! Join us at the theatre on the 10th May 2014 from 14h onwards for a spot of collective madness: how many of you will join us in our madcap challenge of running onto the Mont-Bland Bridge, pointing a finger at the water fountain and staying there for fifteen minutes – absolutely dead still while everyone around us hurries about their business ? How many of us will manage a second amazing tableau vivant in the lower streets for another fifteen minutes ? How many of us will be able to muster the courage to face the Saturday shoppers, giving 30 minutes of our life to create an optical illusion, a silent cry, a poetic halt in the maelstrom ? You !! The Am Stram Gram Spring Frozen Day is a flashmob of frozen choreography – each of you will strike a pose, take an attitude, occupy your place in space. It’s the chance to round off the season with an act of beauty celebrating the two dreams that we’ll invent together. Why ? For the beauty of the gesture. Meeting at the Am Stram Gram Theatre on the 10th May 2014 at 14h. A free Spring drink will be offered before we set off. Information and reservations: +022 735 79 24

From September the 24th to October the 20th 2013 Le Hibou, le vent et nous The spectacle will be subtitled in English Saturday, October the 12th, at 5pm Tuesday, October the 15th at 7pm Wednesday, October the 16th at 3pm Saturday, October the 19th, at 5pm 1979. Sébastien and Lola are seven and eight years old. They meet one Christmas Eve in the snow. Like most children, he’s convinced that his parents adopted him and that he’s really the son of a pair of owls. All she’s interested in is seeing the wind. Gérald, Sébastien’s older brother, sees his little brother’s empty bed and figures out that they’ve run away. Gérald’s dreams are stuffed full of packets of crisps. Thirty five years later Lola and Sébastien still love each other. They’re expecting their first child. Sébastien’s mother died a month ago and Sébastien wants to sell the family home, but Gérald, who lives alone in the house, is against the idea. Two brothers, aged 42 and 45, when they get together it’s like an old photo that starts to move – the time frames shift, the unspoken words float to the surface; looking for each other one can find one another. Luckily their childhood accompanies them, steering and consoling them. Like cheesy Italian songs. For this fantasy piece by Fabrice Melquiot two acrobats (using trampolines, tightropes and ground-work) play Sébastien and Lola as children, two child actors voice them, and three actors play the adult parts. Together they create a special language of fantasy, physical theatre and comedy in which theatre and circus styles fuse. All the ages and every age are on stage at the same time. An Am Stram Gram Production. The text in French is available in the Am Stram Gram collection edited by L’Arche Éditeur. Text: Fabrice Melquiot. Directed by: Fabrice Melquiot. Assistants: Léo Begin and Mariama Sylla. Cast: Damien Droin, Dominique Gubser, François Nadin, Nicolas Rossier, Julie Tavert. Singing (voice-over) : Lucia Albertoni. Voice-over : Luna Arzoni, Maurice Aufair, Roméo Ruotolo, Hugues Quester. Stage and Costume Design: Elissa Bier. Sound Design: Nicolas Lespagnol-Rizzi. Lighting Design: Jean-Philippe Roy. Magic: Benoît Dattez. Falcon trainer: Alexandre Thévenin Made possible through the support of the Migros Genève Cultural Service. Am Stram Gram offers the following activities related to the play: - Open rehearsals (Sunday 22th September at 5 p.m. - entrance free, places must be reserved on +022 735 79 24) - Meeting the actors, acrobats and musicians. - Demonstration by the Falcon Trainer Alexandre Thévenin and his owls at the theatre on Wednesday 9th October at 3 p.m. (entrance free, places must be reserved on +022 735 79 24) Director’s vision: Words and actions are the music of everyday life: I watch as the present becomes the past. I have the feeling that this inevitable sliding makes our memories the first haven of fantasy: as we leave behind the real traces of our existence vagueness twists the memories and transforms them into uncertain visions; faces take on new characteristics, landscapes we’ve travelled through fade or become interchangeable opening up in the very process paths into new lands... Nothing is as strange and as foreign to me as that which I have lived. In this interior world that stems from outside myself, predating me and all things human, those I have known go back to the beginnings of time. When, dreaming with my eyes wide open I see myself again as I was when I was a child, human and animal in one, first inhabitant of the watery lair Atlantis adored even to nostalgia (as long as that nostalgia is unyielding, radical, efficient at last; a nostalgia that reveals our taste for the incomplete). As Borges wrote: “all metaphysics is just part of fantasy literature”. The Owl, the Wind and Us articulates three space-time dimensions: the childhood of yesterday, today’s present, and then that time when each surprises the other to create a time outside of time: a suspended time. During childhood the word is first of all the instrument of the body, here the free and wild bodies of the two acrobats playing Sébastien and Lola. Around them float the voices of the children as they had been thirty years earlier: eyes on stalks on Christmas Eve, conversations emerge to nourish, illuminate and guide the present. A clumsy, un-synchronised playback between the leaping bodies and the trembling voices; to relive is to live the difference. Adult, the bodies are heavy and bulky with stodgy food and a hard life, brimful of tears crying over losses and cheesy Italian songs, haunted by childhood and its black magic. And we only have words left to help us re-find the lost animal in us, We only have language with which to glue together the body and the spirit, the human and the animal, myth and poetry. In suspended time yesterday’s children meet today’s adults, under the watchful gaze of the owl’s yellow-orange eyes, in the heart of the forest where childhood mythologies provoke the real until the impossible becomes possible and the imagined strengthens the future of all. The Owl, the Wind and Us is a piece of theatre that questions “the being together”; it is a text about reconciliation, perhaps even about the instinct of harmony, but also about the temptation of barbarity. Fabrice Melquiot.

Friday, November the First, at 7 p.m. Le Bal d'Halloween Big and small, old and young can celebrate Halloween at the Am Stram Gram Theatre, with pumpkins and dancing for all! The Halloween Literary Ball has witches and broomsticks galore! Ghouls and ghosts, spiders, the Man in the Moon, black cats and tooth-rotting sweets! Fancy Dress! Dig out your scariest costume and slather on your most terrifying make-up, then garnish yourself with a few spider’s webs gathered from dark and dusty corners. Sweets a-plenty! How does it work? On the first day four writers meet to listen to some songs. It takes a while, because the music makes them float away on their feelings, but then they have to tune their instruments to eight songs, not one more nor one less. Eight songs that make you want to dance until your legs fall off! Then the four writers invent a story divided into eight chapters. Characters, plot, structure... Take note ! On the second day each writer has a few hours to write two of the eight episodes. The rules of the game are: each piece of text has to finish with the title of the song that follows it. That evening the Am Stram Gram Theatre transforms itself: the spectators are in place sitting under the disco ball, the writers are under the footlights; they take it in turn to read the story they’ve written between them in record-time for this one and only Literary Ball. The dancers / spectators are invited to listen carefully to each piece of text, and then dance like lunatics to the music (not the other way around !). Suitable for all ages, families from here or from elsewhere. Welcome to the party ! an Am Stram Gram Production "Le Laboratoire Spontané" With the writers Sandra Korol, Valérie Poirier, Eddy Pallaro, Fabrice Melquiot Tickets : adults 15 CHF, children (under 18) 12 CHF Reservations on +022 735 79 24