LES ARTS SAUTS
Our story…

Les Arts Sauts Company was born in 1993 over a few drinks between friends. The original idea was to take a trapeze number out of the Big Top and to turn it into a fully-fledged art. Fascinated by trapeze, obsessed with the same yearning - flying as a way of life, they created the first Arts Sauts spectacle (Untitled!) after 5 months of intense work.

An outdoor show, a 20-metre-high Eiffel-like structure, a kind of gigantic Mecano that, once spread out, enabled them to fly in the open, high up in the sky, in a harmonious blend of a natural element and an industrial material imagined by a group of engineering students from Paris and built at the Abattoirs de Marseille under the supervision of Philippe Moutte. The first spectacle was launched in June 1993.

A simple, pure, aesthetic show in which 11 flying madmen darted into space with an indescribable spontaneity. All rocked by the strange sounds of a cello and a lyric voice. Coolly received in France, it was extremely successful abroad, thanks to the support of the AFAA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs). Les Arts Sauts travelled to all the continents before playing in France. That first show was performed over 400 times. Three quarters of those took place abroad.

Les Arts Sauts are much more than just a company. From the very beginning, they have defined themselves as a collective where everyone has a place, a space for expressing and suggesting ideas, without hierarchy or personal power, which operates mostly on the dynamic of a project blending pleasure and professional rigour. The wages are equal for all the members of the Company; each is a strong link, indispensable to this common story.

In 1998, Les Arts Sauts decided to go even further and to create a new spectacle which, after their open-air show, reinvented the Big Top. They worked with an architect who designed a 20-metre inflatable bubble. While preserving the most important feature - the magic and the art of trapeze which are distinctive to the company - les Arts Sauts' main idea remained the quest for the void, for height and weightlessness. It's around the discipline of trapeze that other artistic elements were to be added, supplementing and enriching it. The shows become original compositions, choreographies in which the body can develop its quest, without showmanship.

Kayassine was performed 544 times, always with the same passion. Les Arts Sauts spent one year pondering the possibility of a new spectacle. Then, in Australia, the team held a meeting to discuss the latest experimentations concerning flying trapeze. A new dream, a new challenge again: working crosswise trapeze. Some of the company members have been living together for 10 years. Lots of love and sharing naturally drive them to offer the public a third creation.