burnout, documentary circus, visuality

A man piles up some cardboard boxes, jumps onto a treadmill and gets dressed as he rushes away. He tries to make sense of an environment that keeps changing, forcing him, little by little with one repetitive chore after another, to no other choice but this rat race going full speed ahead.

Julien Fournier has used the life stories gathered by Laurence Vielle to examine a work world the requirements of which confine one to absurdity. The email received at 1am that one feels obligated to respond to. The obligation to learn a new trade in just a few months. The brutality of the pressure to rise up the corporate ladder. All these professional situations that feed the slow combustion towards a burn out. Using his acrobat’s body as a revealing example, Julien Fournier exposes the suffering provoked by this insidious system, pathological in its quest for more and more productivity. Crossing documentary circus with choreographic poetry, Burning depicts a man radically changing by progressively freeing himself of these productivity injunctions.

Author and performance: Julien Fournier

Text author: Laurence Vielle

Interpretation of the voice-over: Caroline Daish

Video design: Yannick Jacquet

Sound design: Raphaël Dodemont

Lighting design: Arié Van Egmond

Model design and set design: Julien Fournier

Set design: Atelier Rododb

Video direction and lighting operator: Emma Laroche

Sound operator: Raphaël Dodemont, Antoine Delagoutte, Brice Agnès

Photography: Jeremy Javierre

Photography and trailer: Hubert Amiel

Tour: Fanny Mayné (MoDul)

Production: L’Habeas Corpus Compagnie

Support for the diffusion: MoDul, structure pour artistes

With creative help: Fédération Wallonie Bruxelles (Direction générale des arts de la scène, Service des arts du cirque)

With the support of: Service public francophone bruxellois et de la Promotion de Bruxelles à la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, Espace Périphérique (Mairie de Paris - Parc de la Villette), compagnie FERIA MUSICA, Centre culturel du Brabant wallon, la Roseraie, Théâtre des Doms

Residence hosting: La Roseraie, Espace Catastrophe - centre international de création des Arts du Cirque, Centre culturel du Brabant wallon, Latitude 50 - Pôle des Arts du Cirque et de la Rue, La Vénerie - Centre culturel de Watermael-Boitsfort, Columban - Espace de Cultures, Espace Périphérique (Mairie de Paris - Parc de la Villette)