Cie Point Zero is a Belgian theatre company based in Brussels, founded in 1993, and has created approximately 15 productions to date. The company's artistic approach is characterised by its exploration of the relationship between actor and puppet, manipulator and manipulated, and more broadly, the animated and the inanimate. Point Zero also explores the ambiguous boundary between the stillness of death and the movement of life. It examines representations of the body: the emerging body, the mythical body, the symbolic body, the body as a puppet, the nearly human, and the monstrous.
The interview took place at the time of the performances given at the Scène Nationale de l’Archipel in Perpignan, France on 15 October 2024.
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Carole Guidicelli: You directed two Shakespeare plays, La Tempête [The Tempest] in 2010 and Le Songe d’une nuit d’été [A Midsummer Night's Dream] in 2022,
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each time making puppets a part of the actors’ performances. Did you choose these works because of the ease with which puppets can portray magical creatures and create wonder?
Jean-Michel d’Hoop: La Tempête was an order from four French-speaking Belgian theatres that pool their resources once a year to put on a bigger production. More specifically, it was the director of the Théâtre Royal de Mons who saw my production of L’École des ventriloques by Alejandro Jodorowsky and wanted to see the same energy put into a great text. He proposed me to stage La Tempête, which excited me as a young director with a passion for Shakespeare! Once we started rehearsing, I realised the challenges that the play entailed.
I met André Markowicz, the translator whose generosity and intelligence enriched our work, but also complicated our task. His presence made us realise the importance of each of Shakespeare's words, making the idea of ‘stabbing’ the father difficult, though it could be necessary to better serve him. We had one year to create the show with about a dozen actors, and I felt like there wasn’t enough time to carry out in-depth research and move away from the Markowicz adaptation.
Carole Guidicelli: So it was an adaptation?
Jean-Michel d’Hoop: Yes, and it was already finished before the rehearsals, but not all adaptations are suitable for puppets, which require concrete actions and situations. La Tempête has a philosophical dimension that puppets cannot always enrich or preserve. This experience taught me to have more confidence in my contemporary vision of the text, even if it is written by Shakespeare. Some scenes of the show, like the duo between Miranda and Ferdinand, were really successful, despite our trouble with the puppets. We experimented with new human-sized puppets, which were heavier and not as easy to manipulate, but visually beautiful.
Carole Guidicelli: Natacha Belova, who made them, said that she selected portraits from the English Renaissance that she scanned and modified with Photoshop.
Jean-Michel d’Hoop: That's right, and Shakespeare's eye appears in almost all of the puppets. The manipulation of the puppets in La Tempête turned out to be more complex than in our previous shows. Maybe we were also less bold, and our interpretation of the text was less contemporary than usual. However, we were able to break several conventions by switching suddenly between the characters played by the actors and actresses and those played by puppets. But we were limited by a text that, as is often the case in Shakespeare, contains too many references that are only meaningful today for a certain elite. This made the task complex.
Carole Guidicelli: You said that you were not satisfied with the scenography. Can you explain why?
Jean-Michel d’Hoop: I didn’t have enough time to develop a coherent vision of the play. The scenography, with a large structure on wheels and a six-to-eight-metre-wide canvas, required the assistance of the entire team to move it and limited our inventiveness and audacity. The text also gave us some trouble, particularly the long exposition scenes or the more philosophical scenes, while the scenes with Caliban and the lovers worked well. If I had to revisit La Tempête, I would explore bolder ideas. At the time, I was under the charm of the poetry of the play and I didn’t perceive the political and colonial aspects as much.
Carole Guidicelli: In Le Songe d’une nuit d’été, you chose an original scenography, suggestive of a Japanese pavilion with sliding doors instead of a forest or an Athenian palace. How did you come up with such a simple and effective solution?
Jean-Michel d’Hoop: The scenography works like a puppet show. Le Songe d’une nuit d’été has often been done as a romantic play, because of the fairies and the forest: everything seems cute and nice. But that is surprising to me, because I find the play to be rather cruel, even if we made it a comedy. I could see it sway easily towards tragedy, because you find stories of cheating, and even rape (Demetrius threatens to rape Helena if she keeps following him, and Titania is bewitched in her sleep to sleep with a donkey). Nevertheless, you still feel the pleasure of the acting, with this constant mise en abyme. One of the aspects that struck us the most when reading the play was the way in which the acting is highlighted. You can easily imagine Shakespeare surrounded by his actors, having a wild time with the improvising actors, while taking notes from the stage.
But to get back to the set, we chose not to focus on nature, but rather to explore a place of refuge for young people, to which they could withdraw, run away and defy the laws of Athens. We imagined a safe space, like an abandoned pavilion in the woods, reminding me of when I was an adolescent in Brussels, where I liked to explore abandoned houses. These places offered a space for freedom, far from the control of adults, and with friends, we even created a squat that felt like home. So we designed a unique place, but in continuous transformation, and that enhances the convention in one way or another. The mise en abyme technique is omnipresent in Shakespeare. You just have to put a tree onstage to suggest a forest. Furthermore, from the start, the puppeteers are visible, and the theatrical convention is clearly established in each scene. You just have to put the golden throne of Theseus onstage to find yourself in the Athenian court. This clear and effective symbol stimulates the imagination, like the tree for the forest. We had to find the signs that allowed us to act out everything in this space, by adding one carefully chosen object each time.
We also worked on a space that would make it possible to observe and to be observed. However, we understood that if we took this idea too far, the audience would anticipate all the entrances of the characters, and we would lose the element of surprise. So we imagined a system of sliding doors, so that the place could exist in and of itself, and have its own magic. When all of a sudden Titania says, ‘[…] Fairies, away. / We shall chide downright if I longer stay’ (2.1.149–50), the door closes, even if we are in a forest. Everything was included in our work to promote more appearances, surprises, and magic. We also realised that we were missing a place where Titania could fall asleep and be bewitched. We therefore built a wooden structure on wheels that, on one side, forms a green area with flowers, and on the other, has the bathtub that we will find her in later on.
Carole Guidicelli: It's also a way to make the space dynamic.
Jean-Michel d’Hoop: Yes, the space can be changed thanks to little, well-chosen elements, but the actors and actresses are always the ones who make these slight transformations. It's a race behind the scenes, because we don’t have a stage manager. Given that the acting is very physical and that the actors and actresses have to change characters frequently, sometimes in just a few seconds, everyone really supports each other backstage.
Carole Guidicelli: Why did you choose Le Songe d’une nuit d’été?
Jean-Michel d’Hoop: I am also a drama professor in a Belgian theatre school (‘école supérieure de théâtre’) and Le Songe d’une nuit d’été is a play that I often worked on with aspiring actors and actresses. So I had the opportunity to explore the comic potential of the situations while working on particularly dynamic or clownish versions of the play.
One day, when I asked myself the question, ‘What is love today?’, I realised that everything was possible. Le Songe d’une nuit d’été also allows me to approach the question of gender and to distance myself from the hetero-normative vision of love. Puppets offer the possibility of presenting several interpretations simultaneously without having to explain them, so that it doesn’t have to become heavy-handed. What I like with puppets is that if you show the people manipulating them, it adds other levels of interpretation. For example, if a person identified as male visibly manipulates a female character, that takes on a certain meaning, and the opposite is also true.
Carole Guidicelli: This playing with gender identities is also reflected in the voices. The actors’ voices quickly tend towards being high-pitched, while actresses’ voices tend to be lower. The apparent gender of the puppeteer's puppet is also dissociated vocally.
Jean-Michel d’Hoop: This approach is completely related to the actors that I work with. The first actress who plays Lysander has a particularly low voice. I was her teacher at theatre school and I saw her play male roles very easily. The freedom that she finds in these roles makes it so that even when she plays Lysander, the choice to give her this role doesn’t surprise anyone.
Carole Guidicelli: The couple formed by Theseus and Hippolyta surprises us with its openly ridiculous acting, with a Theseus with a British accent and a high-pitched voice and a Hippolyta with a husky, throaty voice.
Jean-Michel d’Hoop: The same actress moves the puppets of Theseus and Hippolyta and makes them speak, and their dialogue must be very lively. It is therefore crucial to make a strong distinction between their two voices. This decision perhaps stems from a certain British imagining of royalty, which takes the form here of an angry, ridiculous, almost bouncy little king. It also stems from the aesthetic aspect of the puppets: Hippolyta's face is a little more damaged than the King's….
The roles were distributed from the start: I knew who would play my first Lysander, my Titania, and so on. All the role changes that took place afterwards were decided on set, taking into account the cuts and readjustments made to the text. For the role of Titania, I chose a very tall, non-binary performer who does drag. The first performer of Oberon was also much taller than the one who took over the role later on, and he also did drag. The initial cast therefore included a couple of very tall people playing the deities of the forest, in stark contrast to the couple formed by Hippolyta and Theseus, whose puppets, like their puppeteers, were smaller. I really wanted to preserve this aspect and I also liked the fact that the performers were two people involved in the queer and drag worlds.
Dramaturgically, I wanted to explore the theme of contemporary love, where gender is of little importance. This stability made sense in contrast. I had a long discussion with the entire team, made up of many people who were deeply committed to feminist issues, to think about how to make the play resonate today, particularly with regard to marriage. I had, of course, ruled out certain elements from the start. When I arrived at the first rehearsals, I had already done a lot of work, but we continued our discussions to give an extra voice to Hippolyta, as well as Hermia and Helena, so that in the end they would be a little less disadvantaged compared to the boys. We thought about how to integrate a more feminist discourse into these moments and question patriarchy. The challenge was to do this without compromising either the comic tone or the spirit of Shakespeare. To do this, we drew on other works by Shakespeare. I also added a few phrases of my own, but they’re fairly limited: they’re mainly transitions and small touches.
Carole Guidicelli: So several voices were put together?
Jean-Michel d’Hoop: The aim was to explore both patriarchy and the dynamics of domination, which are not limited to patriarchy but also encompass hierarchical relationships. For example, the character of Theseus has a caricatural patriarchal discourse. However, this representation also has a political dimension: he is a king and occupies a throne. I thought it would be interesting to play on his stature and portray him as a very small character to ridicule him.
Carole Guidicelli: Was this desire to discredit him present from the outset?
Jean-Michel d’Hoop: Through the character of Theseus, we wanted to criticise power and highlight the fact that these characters act like puppets. This could be suggestive of certain individuals who seek revenge for a frustration, which translates into an abuse of power or exacerbated misogyny. In any case, it conjures up concrete images and real people that we thought of.
For me, one small problem with this choice of direction was the difficulty of believing in the jealousy between Oberon and Titania. Oberon implies that Titania is attracted to Theseus, while she reproaches him for having been Hippolyta's lover. The difference in scale between the puppets makes it unlikely that these large characters would be interested in these small ones. So a little imagination is necessary.
Carole Guidicelli: For my part, I wasn’t bothered: the situation between Titania and Oberon is so tense that they end up blaming each other for anything!
Jean-Michel d’Hoop: We had the same thought. Their argument starts off about a child, but we chose not to deal with that aspect. I almost feel that Shakespeare made a mistake here. The reason for their conflict, which disrupts the whole kingdom, is that Titania refuses to hand over a child to Oberon. But there is no scene showing this. So we say, ‘thank you Shakespeare, you claim that the whole kingdom is a mess because of this dispute, but there is no scene illustrating this’. In addition, today it can take on a connotation of paedophilia, which made it even less clear. We ended up concluding that it was simply a domestic dispute between deities.
Carole Guidicelli: How did you go about rewriting the ending? Did you hesitate between several versions?
Jean-Michel d’Hoop: I quickly decided that there would be no wedding at the end of the play. We cut Act 4 down so much that there's almost nothing left. This creates a strange impression, because at first you think that Hermia and Helena might marry Lysander and Demetrius after the artisans’ show, whereas in Shakespeare the show follows the wedding. However, I was initially convinced that the two young couples were destined to be together. In the end, we decided to leave the situation more open-ended. At the end, the characters are looking for each other, and we wonder whether they’re going to come back or whether they’ve gone to live somewhere else: the mystery remains. We saw Hermia and Helena leave the stage, which leaves several possible interpretations. Some people conclude that they have left to pursue a lesbian romance.
Carole Guidicelli: Indeed, the show plays on a multiplication of desire and attraction. For example, Hermia and Helena, after inhaling the magic flower, find themselves attracted to each other and their two puppets kiss. At other times, the puppeteers start to get physically close, while their puppets keep their distance. Who ultimately represents the character? Is it just the puppet, or sometimes also the puppeteer? Alternately or simultaneously?
Jean-Michel d’Hoop: That's exactly it. I use this confusion to show that we are fully aware of our actions.
Carole Guidicelli: Is your version of A Midsummer Night's Dream a puppet show?
Jean-Michel d’Hoop: I don’t see myself as a puppeteer, although that may seem strange. We work with actors and actresses, and the puppet is just another acting tool, even if I am attached to it. It has to remain a game: we’re not just puppeteers, we’re also actors. We like to play with this duality. It's a schizophrenic pleasure. The pleasure of puppetry lies in being able to be ‘this’ and ‘also that’ at the same time. As in love, it's not certain that we can be reduced to a single gender or a single type of attraction. Everyone does what they want. At least for a summer's night.
Point Zéro is a theatre company that, from the outset, has been committed to exploring all the expressive possibilities of puppetry. Almost every show is an opportunity to explore the potential of puppetry and to deepen our experimentation. Each text and each creative project encourage us to find a place for puppets.
Carole Guidicelli: I found the way in which you dealt with magic to be particularly convincing. Instead of appearing through tricks, it is brought to life by the intervention of additional puppeteers.
Jean-Michel d'Hoop: The idea of adding extra puppeteers in certain scenes quickly came up. With our handheld puppets, fixed at the waist and moved by a single person, the figure often ends up with an inactive arm that we have to hold in a given posture to prevent it from wobbling. Introducing a second person onstage to manipulate a puppet enriches the story: with eight puppets and all the actors onstage, we create a real crowd! It also opens the door to games about gender. We wanted to expose all the tricks and conventions, so costume changes take place in full view.
The idea of involving a second person in the manipulation of the puppets was there from the start, but then we asked ourselves, ‘What if it was magic that did it?’ We thought about how it would work, the technical aspects involved, and how to choreograph the whole thing. We even went so far as to have Helena ‘die’ onstage to allow Puck and Oberon to come to life in their turn, and even to get dressed onstage to do so. Thanks to the distinct voices of Oberon's and Helena's two puppeteers, the audience immediately recognises these characters. The transition time in front of the audience also underscores our transparency, and the audience appreciates this. Everything becomes a pretext for acting; everything becomes a pretext for theatre.
Carole Guidicelli: It also leads to a new conception of the body as a graft, growth, or prosthetic, raising deep questions about feelings of identity and otherness. How did you come up with this idea? Did it require any special physical preparation?
Jean-Michel d'Hoop: We work in a very physical way, with fairly intense trainings. In our company, we have male and female dancers, not in the classical sense of the term, but people with remarkable physical abilities. With these body-puppets, the more physically involved we can get, the more impressive the results. For example, the character of Puck performs a cartwheel with just one hand, which opens the door to great artistic possibilities. However, it's essential to manage the transitions before and after, because it's precisely these moments that are important for the puppet. Yes, it is our intention to explore more extreme bodies and to work on leg movements.
Carole Guidicelli: I also noticed the importance of the sound work. A scene has been added at the beginning of the play, between Hermia and Lysander, where only onomatopoeia is used. Was this the result of improvisation?
Jean-Michel d’Hoop: No, we started with this first court scene, the one that gave us the most trouble. It's really boring. It's an expository scene, so we had to keep all the elements necessary for the audience to understand what comes next. We struggled with this scene, which remains complex, especially with names like Theseus, Hippolyta, and so on. It's difficult for young people: there's so much information to assimilate … From the first run-through, I felt all the violence of this exposition scene. We hadn’t yet found the humour, and it took us a long time to define the characters and find the right nuances. At the beginning, even for the king, we were in a fairly violent dynamic, trying out harder approaches where the king really came across as a tyrant (which he really is). And Egeus is even worse than Theseus: he wouldn’t hesitate to put his daughter to death rather than let her marry the man she loves. Both he and Theseus are monsters. We had to work very hard to find this lightness, moving towards a more cartoonish style, even for the villains. For Egeus, I said to the actor: ‘Think of Louis de Funès – he plays despicable people, but he makes you laugh’. We needed this lightness, because the message had to be conveyed, but we had to get away from the first degree.
Carole Guidicelli: Theseus is the only character to speak frequently in English, while Hippolyta translates his words into French. Why this choice?
Jean-Michel d’Hoop: It was a decision taken from the start. Without it, Hippolyta would not really exist. She would just be a passive figure, with just one line in the first scene of the play where she declares, ‘Yes, in four days we’re going to get married and we’ll be reunited and everything will be fine’. Thank you, Shakespeare, but she's the queen of the Amazons, warriors who are figures of feminism! So we wanted to give her a more assertive presence, so that the audience could identify her better. Theseus keeps her on a leash and treats her like a trophy. Despite this, we wanted to give her a voice. She clearly expresses her displeasure at being there, which was important to us but which Shakespeare doesn’t emphasise. I needed to give Hippolyta a real personality so that she could reappear at other times.
In this first scene, it was essential to establish who the real lovers were. The expository scene doesn’t provide any room for this. So I thought it would be interesting to have these lovers meet up at night. When I was very young, I used to sneak out to of the house to meet my lover, quite romantically, using sheets. One day I got caught by the police, which was less romantic.
Carole Guidicelli: We do really see a true expression of love in this scene.
Jean-Michel d’Hoop: In the second scene, too, when they kiss, there's desire. As ridiculous as they are, their spontaneity is still touching.
Carole Guidicelli: I was also struck by the onomatopoeia and sounds, such as the lisp.
Jean-Michel d’Hoop: We worked with the musician throughout the rehearsals, which led to a real exchange. The actors began to get comfortable. The difficulty lies in not simply reproducing this vocal score, but in feeding it. That remains a challenge, even after 130 performances.
Carole Guidicelli: You worked on our imagination with sounds, even incorporating the sounds of kisses.
Jean-Michel d’Hoop: Yes, it happened quite naturally, because we allowed a lot of freedom. I start by giving the actors and actresses a great deal of freedom, encouraging them to act and have fun. The more choreographed part comes later. I’m not at all someone who imposes constraints from the outset. Of course, there are guidelines, and we refine them gradually, but performing is still a pleasure. I’m lucky enough to work with a team that knows each other very well, in an atmosphere of total enjoyment. As a result, everything has fallen into place quite naturally over time, depending on the performances. You have to find the right balance, especially in a large venue like this, where the acoustics are complex. We can’t just add elements anywhere. Now it's fairly calibrated. Even the little improvisations that seem spontaneous are actually planned, they’re musical, and the performance partner has to be aware of them. Puppetry demands great precision, because everything moves so fast: we have to move from one character to another, from one focus to another.
Carole Guidicelli: In this show, all the puppets are what we call in French ‘marionnettes portées’,
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but of different kinds. The fairies are represented by handheld puppets while Titania, Oberon, Puck, and others from the kingdom and the lovers are played by body-puppets. Theseus and Hippolyta are smaller puppets (another sort of ‘marionnette portée’). Finally, the artisans are played by actors wearing identical costumes. Did you ever consider having them perform as puppets as well?
Jean-Michel d’Hoop: From the start, I wanted the artisans to be played by actors rather than puppets, because that made the production of their show too complicated. I also didn’t see the role of puppets in this context. If the artisans were themselves puppets, how could they stage other puppets? It didn’t seem coherent to me. For me, the scenes with the artisans are clown scenes, moments of buffoonery designed as such from the start. We initially worked with hairpieces and masks for jokes and tricks, without trying to embody clowns.
Furthermore, there are similarities between the clown and puppet techniques: in both cases, there is a wide variety of expressions and a very marked rhythm. In the artisans’ scenes, the movements are extremely regulated, almost choreographed, creating a group effect similar to that of a choir. It is very precise: even the head movements are synchronised. It is a frontal performance, with an exalted feel.
Carole Guidicelli: Did you in some way ‘puppetise’ the actors who play the artisans?
Jean-Michel d’Hoop: Yes, exactly, I ‘puppetised’ them. The puppet ate them. I wanted to find an acting code that remained in the same universe, that corresponded somewhat to the same pattern.
Carole Guidicelli: The staging is influenced by a queer reading and the aesthetics of drag shows. It's a very theatrical field, and it can be difficult to avoid clichés, although there are also some very funny elements that are worth revisiting. How did you go about it?
Jean-Michel d’Hoop: There are happy coincidences … Initially, I wanted to work on gender fluidity. I had imagined that Oberon and Titania would belong to the queer world, but it's not a world that I’m very familiar with. It turns out that Loïc Nebreda, who made the puppets for the show, is involved in the queer world, as is the person who makes the costumes and the two main actors and actresses. Oberon's first performer, Adrien de Biasi, even won a drag race Belgium show with his character Drag Couenne. He had to stop performing Oberon because he has so much work in this field. All these people were able to nourish me and nourish the project. To be completely honest, I didn’t realise the political importance of identity, what it means today. As I worked on it, I realised the importance of the demands made by the queer movement. I also learned: I started reading a lot about this topic. I went to see Adrien in his shows, and I found it incredible. So I became much more aware. There's also someone who will be taking over the role created by Héloïse Meire in the show, and a non-binary person, who is transitioning, will be helping her. I’ve become much more aware of these issues now, and the whole team is also paying attention to that.
Carole Guidicelli: The people you hire from the queer world are actors and performers who had no experience with puppetry. Did you train them in puppetry?
Jean-Michel d’Hoop: Yes, I did. A good half of the team already had puppetry experience, but the others didn’t. So it required intensive training. Every morning, we devoted two hours to training. We supported each other. It was quite difficult for many of them, because you have to work your muscles to adapt to a choreography. Some of them were quick learners. I also organised auditions for young performers in a programme similar to what you call the Jeune Théâtre National in France,
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which allowed me to meet the performers of Titania, Lysandre, Hermia, and Oberon.
