La Leçon - Pietragalla-derouault - Tournée

L’InterValle welcomes Pietragalla – Derouault

At L’InterValle, we are honored to open our stage to Pietragalla – Derouault as their Tournée brings La Leçon to our audience. Hosting creators whose language is movement as much as it is theatre lies at the heart of our mission, and this encounter promises an evening where poetry, precision, and presence converge. Our team has prepared the theater to foreground the intimacy of this work: the clarity of breath, the contours of gesture, and the delicate shifts of tone that define the duo’s signature. From the first cue to the final blackout, our house will be tuned to highlight the dramaturgy of bodies in dialogue—sharp, musical, and irresistibly human. Whether you have followed their trajectory for years or are discovering them for the first time, La Leçon offers a rare contact with artists who invigorate the stage with a disciplined freedom. L’InterValle’s versatile stagecraft and close audience-proscenium relationship invite you into a shared focus, allowing even the smallest inflection to resonate with the force of a revelation.

Inside La Leçon

La Leçon draws its pulse from a celebrated text of the theatre of the absurd, and Pietragalla – Derouault recast it through their distinctive choreographic lens. The familiar figures of the Professor and the Pupil become vectors of power, tenderness, wit, and danger, transposed into a kinetic score where words collide with silence and silence becomes movement. The duet is both theatrical and physical: a lecture that turns into a dance, a dance that argues, teases, instructs, and ultimately unsettles. In our space at L’InterValle, the piece’s interplay of proximity and distance will be keenly felt—the crisp edges of a gesture, the pivot from pedagogy to possession, the flicker of irony under a smile. Light carves the action into lucid chapters; shadows let ambiguity seep in. Costumes and props appear with the economy of a chalkboard diagram and the potency of a ritual. Above all, La Leçon affirms the duo’s dramaturgical finesse: they sculpt tempo as playwrights sculpt lines, and the audience is invited not merely to watch but to read the movement—sentence by sentence, pause by telling pause.

As we welcome this performance to L’InterValle, we also celebrate the continuing artistic vitality of Pietragalla – Derouault. Their company, Le Théâtre du Corps, sustains a repertoire that travels widely while staying anchored in a craft honed across ballet, contemporary dance, and spoken theatre. Recent seasons have seen Marie-Claude Pietragalla revisit her acclaimed solo La Femme Qui Danse, a distilled portrait of an artist conversing with memory and stagecraft, while Julien Derouault deepens his ensemble work that probes collective bodies, masculinity, and the politics of space. Together, they nurture the next generation through workshops and collaborations, carrying an ethos that links virtuosity to accessibility. The arrival of La Leçon on their current Tournée exemplifies that living practice: a classic revisited not as relic but as encounter, charged with today’s questions about authority, education, and the fragile borders between care and control. Our audience at L’InterValle will meet artists at the height of their clarity, confident enough to pare away the superfluous and courageous enough to let vulnerability lead. We look forward to sharing the charged hush, the quickened breath, and the luminous exactness that make their art a transformative experience.