'Poèmes', the film to discover how to be a "better person, more sensitive and more humane"

Claire Ducreux trained in France as a "pure and tough dancer".

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
25 May 2023 Thursday 22:29
29 Reads
'Poèmes', the film to discover how to be a "better person, more sensitive and more humane"

Claire Ducreux trained in France as a "pure and tough dancer". She immediately began working in different contemporary dance companies. And her career would have followed those paths if it hadn't been for one of those coincidences that only happen once in a lifetime. "At the end of the 90s, I participated in a festival in which there was a room and street theater. When I finished my performance, I was going to the train and I was entertained by a Catalan clown. I saw him perform and I missed the train," he recalls in one interview with La Vanguardia.

And he continues: "There were no walls. He was someone who conquered the public in five minutes, who established a great complicity with the people. I fell in love with street theater and also with him." So Ducreux came to Catalonia and set up, together with his clown, a street theater company that premiered his first show in the year 2000. He continues on that. "It has been the best school of my life, because street theater teaches that there are things that are worthwhile despite sadness or difficulties."

For two decades, Ducreux has toured the streets of Spain, France, Japan or Korea with his shows, but he always thought that the vital philosophy that emerges from this discipline could reach the general public through cinema. So he started writing a script. It took him ten years to finish it and when he had it ready he put it in a drawer, because he "didn't know anyone in the world of cinema". And again one of those coincidences that only happen once in a lifetime happened.

"Héctor Fáver called me to participate in Broken Voices doing a voice in French and I told him that he was wrong because my work is silent, but I did it and I loved it, it was not so different from the gesture." Ducreux and Fáver became friends and she told him about her project: "I asked him to make the film knowing that it is difficult for a creator to put himself at the service of another creator, he said yes and we launched without a network."

The result of this collaboration is Poèmes, which hits the Spanish billboard this Friday and tells the story of a street artist who travels through different cities and towns with her art despite the fact that she is heartbroken because her partner has left her behind. 17 years of relationship. On the tour, she meets a sculptor who, although he doesn't usually show her work, opens up to the dancer. And it is that Poèmes is also a tribute to the work of the Valladolid sculptor Eduardo Cuadrado.

Poèmes has been shot in various settings. Valladolid is one of those chosen because "the TAC festival is held there, which is one of the most important street theater festivals." The film team was also in the Utopia space, 126 del Poblenou and then moved to Viflavocance, one of those charming small French towns where "they organized a festival expressly for the film in which neighbors from neighboring towns participated as extras" .

Viewers of Poèmes will be able to learn a little more about this discipline that "has many advantages, the first is that it is free and ideal for people who don't usually go to the theater because that way they can see things that will move them and that can take them by surprise. In addition, it creates a social fabric by connecting people who otherwise would not know each other." But for Ducreux, the most important thing is that "the artists in these shows take great care of the public and move emotions, which end up making us better people because they don't make us more sensitive and more human."