La Ville, my chaos, my cries, my crowd.

Le Désert, my silence, my harmony, my fulfillment.

My two loves.

Creation as a path between these two poles; creation as a journey or a crossing of the desert, toward an unknown land, toward our own stripping away.

What lies beneath the words,

What lies beneath the act,

What lies beneath the image?

Theater lies between the urgency to speak and the urgency to remain silent.

la compagnie

The theater company Le Désert en Ville, founded in 2017 in the Pays de la Loire region and based in Nantes, develops an eclectic form of theater whose productions blend real-life documents, poetry, music, dance, sound art, visual art, and research into the actor-creator. It creates original plays not based on pre-existing dramatic material, as well as installations; it also conducts cultural outreach programs closely tied to its creative projects, particularly with marginalized audiences. Each project is an exploration that branches out and takes shape through various mediums, which the theatrical creation invites the audience to seek out and express alongside it, so that the horizon of a multifaceted creation may emerge. For the company, the performing arts are a way to bring poetic thoughts and actions into resonance, while continually questioning the human soul and the artistic forms capable of bearing witness to its depths. It unites all of its work under a poetic ethos, striving to blaze a trail.

Juliette Kempf

Author and Director

Juliette discovered butoh at the age of 16. This practice significantly expanded her awareness of the sensory realm and her vision of the performing arts. During a trip to South America, she participated in an acting workshop at the Odin Theater. She then created her first physical theater pieces and performances in Paris, including an experimental Cassandra inspired by Aeschylus’s Agamemnon in 2011. In 2012, while living for several months in the Mauritanian desert, she directed a group of traditional musicians and dancers from Adrar. In 2013, she traveled to Poland to explore the work of the Grotowski Institute more closely, following in the footsteps of this pivotal figure in European theater, and collaborated with Robin Riegels, a director trained at the Pontedera Workcenter. Upon her return to France, she began studying singing with masters of the modal tradition: Marcel Pérès and Aram Kerovpyan. In 2014, she was an actress-in-residence at the Andrei Tarkovsky Academy of Sacred Arts and then collaborated with the Théâtre Observatoire International, founded by the Russian-Ukrainian director Sergei Kovalevich, until 2018. In 2015, she launched an artistic project dedicated to healthcare facilities, aimed at opening up a poetic space for patients. In 2015 and 2019, she worked at the Saint-Alban Psychiatric Hospital as part of the “Culture Santé” residency program. Until 2019, she collaborated as a dancer-performer with visual artists.

In 2017, she founded Le Désert en Ville, a name inspired by her many trips to the Sahara Desert and by the space that unfolds there. In 2018, she created Lettres Vives in partnership with the psychiatry department at Nantes University Hospital—a collaboration that led to a poetic performance inside the abandoned asylum in Volterra and a photographic installation that echoed it, Réponse(s), for which she wrote the texts and created the sound design. She wrote an article for the journal Chimères about this creative journey. L’Ours de granit published a personal book based on this work: La fiancée de papier, which was published in 2026.

From 2019 to 2022, she worked on the multifaceted project Mémoire(s). Three works emerged in the fall of 2022: the performance Souviens-toi d’avant l’aube, premiered at La Soufflerie, a state-subsidized theater in Rezé; the sound installation En Souvenances; and the Super 8 film Dans les eaux de Mémoire, directed by Fabrice Leroy based on her staging. In connection with her installation En Souvenances, she was invited to contribute an article to the journal Bachelard Studies. In March 2023, she published the book Au seuil de l’aube – un cheminement soufi (On the Threshold of Dawn: A Sufi Journey), with Le Relié, co-authored with Abdelhafid Benchouk.

In 2024, she created Le Chant Végétal, a project exploring poetic and theatrical choral performance based on the work of Marcelle Delpastre, featuring narrators who are undergoing psychiatric treatment. She was invited to speak about it at a conference on the poet in 2024. Alongside her theater projects, she appears in Fabrice Leroy’s poetic and artisanal films.

In March 2026, she premiered L’Enveillée, a theatrical and choral work exploring death, at Le Lieu Unique, the National Theater of Nantes; as well as the exhibition of poetic texts Un jour sans heure, inspired by the team’s work at the palliative care center La Maison de Nicodème.

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Équipe

Partenaires

Fondation Reine Reinette
Fondation Allier