Jacques à dit
A model delivery worker.
A parcel with no address.
A joyful disobedience.
juggling · magic · unicycle · sound effects · tinkering · accordion · a mystery parcel
The show
Jacques has been employee of the month for fourteen months. He delivers, he scans, he smiles. It's mandatory. One morning, a parcel with no address refuses to be delivered. The rules are clear: it must be destroyed. Jacques, for the first time in his life, is going to disobey, by giving away everything he has and everything he knows how to do.
A show where juggling is born from the rulebook, where magic only obeys invitations, and where the audience discovers laughingly what they would do if Jacques told them: "do whatever you want".
Technical specifications
| Genre | Burlesque and participatory circus — juggling, magic, unicycle, tinkering, sound effects and accordion |
| Audience / duration | Family show, from age 5 — 45 min |
| Space | Square, courtyard, multipurpose hall, theatre, big top… — 6 × 6 × 3 m, flat ground |
| Capacity | 30 to 300 people, semicircle seating preferred |
| Technical | Fully self-sufficient — set-up 2 h (45 min minimum), strike 1 h (30 min minimum) — 1 artist and 1 technician (depending on venue) on tour |
| Booking fee | Contact us |
Credits
Written and performed byLaurent BARATTERO
Highlights
- The rulebook that, through its own contradictions, invents juggling before the audience's eyes
- The Central, the authority, elected by applause meter
- Gifts genuinely given away, a lesson in how to receive ("you shouldn't have!")
- A magic that refuses orders and only accepts invitations
- A "single-wheeled service vehicle" that Jacques apparently doesn't know how to ride… really?
- A finale played with fifty hands, and a mystery parcel there from the very first moment to the very last
Director's note
Loosely inspired by Marcel Mauss (the gift) and Étienne de La Boétie (voluntary servitude), "Jacques a dit" speaks of giving and obedience without a word of a lesson: everything happens through the game that audiences have played since the school playground. Children see the story of a delivery worker who frees himself; adults hear the rest.
ARTICLE 14 — In the event of a contradiction between two articles, apply both.
pour David Graeber (1961–2020) — anthropologue de la bureaucratie et du don
Want to programme us?
For any booking enquiry, fee request or further information, write to us — we will reply with pleasure.
Prefer to write directly? contact@cirque-en-poche.fr