Laurent Bazin

Laurent Bazin
Period: 2015-2016
Profession: Director Born in 1981, Laurent Bazin studied literature and philosophy, before taking a post-graduate diploma (DESS) in directing at Paris X Nanterre. His work invokes subjects that are often unusual for the theater, such as plastic surgery, comic strips, spiritualist doctrine and sensory marketing. Each time, he tries to conceive a new way of articulating text and image: faux lecture, medieval thriller, futuristic fable, visual ballet, shadow theater. The question of our relationship to seeing runs through each of his shows. After working with the MC93 in Bobigny, he became artist-in-residence at La Loge, a multi-disciplinary Parisian center dedicated to young artists, where he experimented extensively with stagecraft. His show
Bad Little Bubble B. won the jury prize at the 2013 Impatience Festival organized by 104, the Théâtre du Rond-Point and
Télérama . He is currently working with the Peking Opera Academy and artists from the Sichuan Opera for
L’Effet W. which will premiere at the Reims Scène d’Europe festival in 2017. At Villa Médicis, Laurent Bazin will investigate the desire to see. Drawing on his personal experience, marked by an eye disease that has followed him since birth, he will question his voracious appetite for the visible, the “slavery of the retina” that he has made his profession. After having sought to produce singular images on stage, he will consider how to modify seeing without modifying the object seen, by working on the image’s surroundings (sound, smell, speech). This work will take many disciplinary paths: performance, virtual reality, graphic novels. These are just some of the ways in which the subject can be harassed and reinvented on a theater stage.