Le Voisin De Et Avec Benoît Turjman

Welcoming Benoit Turjman to Le Complexe - Salle du Haut

At Le Complexe - Salle du Haut, we are delighted to host Le Voisin de et avec Benoit Turjman, a physical-comedy gem that thrives in the intimacy of our upstairs room. From our vantage point as a venue attuned to the nuances of gesture, silence, and timing, this show is a perfect fit: the sightlines emphasize the finesse of his mime and clowning, and the room’s close quarters amplify the quiet ripples of laughter that build into full-bodied bursts. The premise is disarmingly simple—a neighbor in an ordinary building—and yet the performance blooms into a choreography of everyday awkwardness, unspoken rivalries, and unexpected tenderness. Without relying on dialogue, Benoit designs a theatrical score of tiny catastrophes: a door that will not cooperate, a letterbox that yields small surprises, a stairwell that seems to have a will of its own. In our space, those details matter; we prepare a set that privileges precision—light focused like a lens, sound that magnifies the creak of a floorboard—and we watch the audience lean in, catching every raised eyebrow and conspiratorial glance that turns the familiar into the delightfully uncanny.

A current spotlight on Benoit Turjman

As an artist, Benoit Turjman is moving through an exciting period of creative momentum, touring widely while refining the silhouette of his endearingly troublesome voisin. In recent months he has unveiled new sketch sequences within his repertoire that we are thrilled to see land at Le Complexe - Salle du Haut, including “Le Palier,” a hallway ballet of near-encounters, “La Boîte aux Lettres,” a miniature thriller around a misdelivered parcel, “Le Jardin Partagé,” a hymn to communal spaces and mischief, “L’Ascenseur,” a kinetic study in cramped etiquette, and “Le Carton Perdu,” where a simple box becomes a Pandora’s cabinet of surprises. These vignettes demonstrate how his art keeps evolving: the clown’s innocence is sharpened by sleek timing; the mime’s silence is punctuated by inventive sound textures and visual gags that bloom in the spectator’s mind a beat after they appear. From our technical booths, we see how attentively audiences follow his rhythmic architecture—tiny crescendos of movement that break into laughter on the measure, like musical phrasing. The beauty of this moment in his artistic life is its openness: the character of the neighbor, previously a study in shyness and faux bravado, now carries the buoyancy of a living comic universe, as though the building had grown new floors of possibilities.

Hosting Le Voisin in Le Complexe - Salle du Haut allows us to give that universe the scale it deserves: intimate enough for a raised eyebrow to feel monumental, elastic enough for a chase through a stairwell to feel epic. We tune the lights to outline a corridor that could be anyone’s, calibrate the acoustics to let a sigh, a cough, or the rustle of a coat become dramatic punctuation, and we seat audiences close to the action so that complicity flourishes. One of the privileges of our room is seeing how multilingual publics respond—English speakers, French speakers, and visitors from elsewhere—all laughing together because the language is movement and surprise. Families come early, couples slip into the back row, and seasoned theatre lovers trade notes during intermission about how a gesture transformed a mundane object into pure theatre. From the stage door we witness smiles that linger and hear post-show chatter about favorite moments—whether it’s the wary truce in “Le Palier” or the escalating curiosity of “La Boîte aux Lettres.” For anyone curious about contemporary clowning that is both elegant and uproarious, Benoit’s neighbor is ready to ring the bell and invite you into his world, right here at Le Complexe - Salle du Haut.