internal gazette

l’avant courrier

#6

june 2025

1# STEPPING INNNN AND TAKING OFFFF !

L’Avant Courrier is on the move!

The team you’ve known for a few years is undergoing some changes. After 5 years together, Anne will be departing from L’Avant Courrier on the 31th of October. She sure has a heavy heart when thinking she’ll no longer work with her adored colleagues, but it’s time to embark on new professional and personal adventures in Brittany, exploring farms that include social services. A spoonful of the unknown, a pinch of improvisation and three cups of excitement!

Marine Plet is already taking over Anne’s production and booking duties, and we’re delighted to welcome her as our new Avant Courrier team member! Marine came for an internship last November and has already stepped in to handle different assignments since the start of the year. You may already be lucky enough to know her, and if not, you will soon…. We’ll be having a little party in October to officially celebrate the departure and the arrival!

2# New year, new break!

This year it is our super-duper colleague Louise-Michèle will be hitting the road for a 3-month family cycling adventure! Her team of five will be heading for BENELUX! Maximum excitement, maximum fun.

It will also be a chance for a well-deserved professional break, 11 years after the company was founded. On the agenda: Take in some from fresh air and gain expertise on bivouacs, bike mechanics and Baltic languages. Louise-Michèle leaves at the beginning of July and gets back at the end of September, and we know her mind will be as relaxed as her calves will be fit.

3# CLEM’S GOT A BUN IN THE OVEN

We’re gonna be aunties!!! Clémence is expecting her third baby, and this little bundle of joy will be delivered in December (a Sagittarius – yay! – and a large family, that inspires respect✌️).

Her maternity leave will run from mid-October to mid-April 2026. We’ll be recruiting a replacement from July onwards. In the meantime, Lisa is already crocheting a little cardigan, and Clem is in great shape. How beautiful!

4# conflictuality training

We’re carrying on with our reflections and the drafting of different frameworks designed to improve working conditions so we can take the lead in the most complex situations that govern our interpersonal relationships.

With this in mind, Anne took a 3-day training course with La Belle Ouvrage last November entitled ‘Conflictuality: Reflecting on your role as a mediator’.

It was absolutely fascinating, and I’d like to share it with you in the form of audio clips (only in french version though).

Following this training, we’d like to be able to share with you a protocol in the coming months, something  we can use in the future in the event of an interpersonal conflict.

5# art-ivisme

Alright, we want to share this resource with you: the website labo.zone (available in english) focusing on the idea of ‘insurrectionary imaginary laboratory’. It is run by three activists: Isabelle Frémeaux (with a background in teaching and popular education), Jay Jordan (theatre, performance and direct action) and The Vacuum Cleaner (a collective of artists and activists whose work is candid, provocative and joyful).

From the website, we draw on the ideas that move us, touch us, speak to us and wake us up. There you’ll find experiments, workshops, publications and conferences.

We recommend this one >>

We’d like to explore these resources over the coming year and incorporate them into our practices. We’ll keep you informed and would be delighted to discuss the subject with you if it speaks as much to you as it does to us.

6# CIRKUSEXPO, the professional event in sweden

Last February, Louise-Michèle headed to Stockholm for the Cirkusexpo event in her role as Galapiat’s international projects coordinator.

It was a chance to meet up with Nordic and European professionals there, almost 10 years after the professional event held in Subcase in 2016, and to get to know each other IRL.

On top of that, the MAD team was there in force, and Viivi presented ‘V’ at the project presentation sessions, so it was also an opportunity to represent them.

Louise-Michèle was able to meet up again with the MAD team that she had been involved with for several years and to meet Lotta and Stina again, 20 years later!

As for ‘V’, the show seems to have been well received, and we hope that this will lead to a European follow-up.

Highlights:

• The Saint-Brieuc-Stockholm train journey. A short 27-hour ride with a fairly tricky connection in Germany, but our love of night trains and the satisfaction of seeing that it’s not that complicated made the journey worth it!
• A great meeting with the Finnish company Arctic Ensemble and – with the Galapiat international mission hat on – dreaming of collaborative projects under a big top across Europe.
• The show Kyo Ru Gi by the Petri Dish Company: brilliant!

The most striking memory: Hearing about the same financial and ideological problems on the other side of Europe, but also witnessing the urge to continue to rally around the art of circus and the impact it has and seeing how the issues of shared touring are tackled in the Nordic countries.