Audience reactions

The Compagnie Mossoux-Bonté’s shows are always based on clear intuition of outside events. As Patrick Bonté explains, "There are things that we find striking and which make us react. Today, certain behaviors revolve around perverse power struggles with morally-unbridled impulses. I have the impression that many of set-by-default reaction types affect our way of seeing things, of living, and infiltrate us. This all happens subtly. It’s what we call poison" (...).
Five scientists in white jackets are in a laboratory. Sociologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists are there to decipher our habits, our shortcomings, and our sometimes ineffable reflexes. They reflect on the slow spread of this poison.

Maryse Bunel, Relikto / March 2017

 

Whether it be in politics, economics, or social interactions, one usually acts according to one's own personal interests, favoring selfish behaviors over responses that were considered to be rational and wise for the Homo sapiens. As worthy emulators of Molière, Patrick Bonté and Nicole Mossoux use the stage to faithfully reflect these human misconducts (...). 
A fascinating (barely surrealist) and all-too-real take on today’s society.

Jean-Marie Gourreau, Critiphotodanse / March 2017

 

Some expert committee 

They greet one another by shaking hands after they have thoroughly disinfected them, as if it was a bygone social ritual that they were trying to make sense of again. But who are they? They have put lab coats on, which turned them into experts, experts in implementation of absurd injunctions. They will dose themselves up with this self-inflicted nonsense to show us how far it can pervade. Do our private disorders come from higher circles or is it the other way around? They ask themselves the very same question during the performance: would we behave in the same manner if we were state leaders? But let us first ask the question, who are they to dare ask questions and who has authority over the answers? 

The show may have never resonated better than today: what can art - especially when we go to extreme lengths to put its essentiality to the test - do in face of how brutal reality is? By closely observing and monitoring our every quirk and fault, the five behaviourists are codifying a new archaeology of the contemporary. But reality cannot be fooled and tricked that easily, nor can it be transposed by an art form that would transcend it – as tempting as it may sound – into an acceptable image. The advertising industry is therefore left alone and to its own devices to try and put a bit of make-up on all of it …

Manon Dumonceaux / October 2020