The company was created in 2002, in Le Havre, by Sarah Crépin and Étienne Cuppens. The duo combine their individual imaginations together to create projects of a choreographic nature : live shows and art installations.

 

From the beginning, popular culture, and the figures that have emerged from it, have been the basis of their work. Étienne Cuppens and Sarah Crépin also draw on their childhood memories - real or imaginary - to invent characters that resonate with the collective unconscious and which take on a new dimension through dance. Mummies, hybrid manga heroines, ghosts, the "Venus of Willendorf" made from pillows or sailors with lobster claws, all make up a bestiary which is both graphic and emotionally stirring, a kind of phantasmagoria leading to the invention of stories.

​

Their shared fascination with optical effects has lead them to invent stage sets where the position of the audience is questioned: the members of the audience have been known to be moved around on chairs with wheels pushed by the performers, or are hidden indoors looking through large windows to the performance space outside, or they can experience the show reclining in deckchairs facing mirrors which reflect the performance behind them ... The audience finds themselves in unusual situations, and is encouraged to view the performance in an active and playful way.

​

The duo of artists is a combination of a certain attraction for abstraction on one side and a real taste for dramaturgy on the other. When working on the stage or in the dance studio, Etienne Cuppens and Sarah Crépin use the "free association of ideas". Thus, they provoke a clash between different elements which do not theoretically have anything to do with each other but which, when combined, become a source of meaning and emotion. This process unbridles the imagination, broadens the scope of possibilities and gives both adults and children in the audience a choice between several different interpretations. Offering this freedom to choose different interpretations and meanings is fundamental to La BaZooKa’s work.

​

​

 

Indeed, the artistic approach of the company is the following :

​

to navigate between fiction and abstraction,

to create figures as characters which can be followed,

to provoke the audience’s imagination,

to fluctuate between that which is visible and the invisible,

to question the effects of being part of a community,

and a quest for lightness ..