PERFORMANCE
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Created as a collective in 2014 in Berlin, and founded as a company in 2018 in Paris, Gray Box’s work takes interest in going beyond the boundaries between "white cube" and "black box": choreography, image and object, by emphasizing the body and movement as central forms of expression. Based on transdisciplinary research and collective experimentation, our company creates, curates and produces, in all horizontality, a body of work with a strong political, ecological and social dimension. We consider the moving body together with its immaterial aspects - such as perception, empathy, emotions, intuitions - as a political tool to forge emancipated communities, create social connections and human interactions.
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By exploring the ideological, cultural, political and historical parameters that shape our taste, what is meant by “popular culture” and “canonized culture”, by “good taste” and “bad taste”, “high culture” and “low culture”, Gray Box is interested in how anti-canonical and anti-contemporary aesthetics can be used as a means of opposition to class hierarchies, and how they can become a tool in the struggle against normative behaviors and dominant ideologies.
Faced with an overproduction of artistic proposals, Gray Box believes in a new economy of the performing arts: less fast, more local, more sustainable and more ethical, with the hope to stop geographical divisions, and to respond to the evolution of social and environmental issues of our time. By deciding to perform mainly in alternative, remote, small, lesser-known and outlying places, the company wishes to, on one hand, address a large and diverse audience and, on the other hand, to free itself from the obsession with career, fame, glory, this race for novelty and visibility generates. Gray Box tries to create and co-create its projects with and for the inhabitants, the users and the local associative fabric in order to create bridges between those who have access to art and those who do not. We believe that art can be used as a tool for social justice, that art can make the difference.
In the past years Gray Box has performed across Europe (FR, D, HU, SB, HR, AT...), in major cities and small towns alike, in formal and informal, indoor and outdoor spaces. We have been in-residence with many theaters and at universities (FR, HU, SB, AM, AT...), and held workshops for both professionals and non-professionals, adults, teens and children, in art spaces, conservatories, festivals, camps and nightclubs.
Faced with an overproduction of artistic proposals, Gray Box believes in a new economy of the performing arts: less fast, more local, more sustainable and more ethical, with the hope to stop geographical divisions, and to respond to the evolution of social and environmental issues of our time. By deciding to perform mainly in alternative, remote, small, lesser-known and outlying places, the company wishes to, on one hand, address a large and diverse audience and, on the other hand, to free itself from the obsession with career, fame, glory, this race for novelty and visibility generates. Gray Box tries to create and co-create its projects with and for the inhabitants, the users and the local associative fabric in order to create bridges between those who have access to art and those who do not. We believe that art can be used as a tool for social justice, that art can make the difference.
In the past years Gray Box has performed across Europe (FR, D, HU, SB, HR, AT...), in major cities and small towns alike, in formal and informal, indoor and outdoor spaces. We have been in-residence with many theaters and at universities (FR, HU, SB, AM, AT...), and held workshops for both professionals and non-professionals, adults, teens and children, in art spaces, conservatories, festivals, camps and nightclubs.
FASHION
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Gray Box melds designing for the performing arts with fashion, defines the catwalk as a theatre stage, and showcases thematic, socially and politically engaged collections as conceptual art. At the intersection of clothing as performance costume and as conceptual fashion, our theory and practice-oriented researches focus on the performative, choreographic, and dramatic potential of fashion shows, together with the performative aspect of wearing clothes. Through questioning the original functions of the items and of the established codes of the fashionable body, Gray Box collections and fashion performances transgress normative discourses, challenge gender boundaries, systems of representation, and standards of beauty. Our collections experiment with silhouettes, constructions, materials, objects, technology, and our fashion-performances avoid linearity, and narrative strategies.
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EDUCATION
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Gray Box's carries out experimental and transdisciplinary education activities (workshops, classes, research laboratories...) based on questioning, criticizing, unlearning, protesting and resisting. Structured with exercises, creative tasks, dialogues and presentations, these educational contexts are helping participants to push themselves out of their comfort zone, transform their imagination and open themselves to new forms, aesthetics and inspirations. During the activities they use different techniques and tools to generate both new works and seeds for the work they are in the midst of creating. They are doing automatic drawing and writing, video, gifs and photography together with performances, including dancing, storytelling, and puppet theatre within an intensive and experimental context. So as to stimulate different parts of the brain and the body, they move back and forth between creative writing, visual exercises and performance tasks. Participants also receive one-on-one mentoring (including critical feed-back in the analysis, application of the method and the clarity of details) during the development of their own original artwork(s), that can be optionally presented to the public at the end.
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