Sébastien Barrier is an actor, juggler, stuntman, musician and whip artist. In 1992 while studying Literature and History at university at Le Mans he discovered acting by taking part in workshops based on the Stanislavski method. In 1994 he took a course at the Lido, the centre of Circus Arts at Toulouse, where he worked on juggling and patter. He then worked with various companies: Carnage Productions (“Horizon Boucher” in 1995-1996), Genre de Cirque between 1996 and 2000, Compagnie Le Phun ("Les Gûmes" between 2001 and 2004, "Le Train Phantôme" between 2003 and 2005). In 2006 he won an award for Young Circus Talent with Julien Cassier and Christophe Rulhes for the project 'Singularités ordinaires'; together they created the artistic research group Nos Autres. Since August 2004, "Ronan Tablantec" has had over 400 performances, most often outside any "cultural" context. It is a partially improvised solo performance on the borderline between fairground animation and spontaneous sociology.
"By rushing headlong onto the street without a text, without a character, without rehearsals or a concept, not even an idea of what I would be able to do apart from some rough and ready circus, I hardly expected that I would giving birth to a little personal project which would soon take up the best part of my time, and would give me provisional answers to my doubts about my rapport with street performance. Above all I was far from imagining that this project would allow me to tell story to others, thinly disguised behind the character and to say to them, in a flood of words, more or less anything that came into my head, with a kind of humour which was social, sociological, spontaneous, sincere, intimate, uncompromising, thoughtful, committed, relevant and clairvoyant – when I get inspired – no so much cynical in fact as pitilessly and tenderly mocking."
S.B.
