Le Cabaret Frigo

An interview with Balthazar Gaulier, artistic director at ‘Rouge Rouge 3’.
Interviewed by Néstor Romero Clemente.

Néstor: What exactly is Rouge Rouge 3?

Balthazar: We are a multidisciplinary collective that works with live shows, so mainly theatre and music, but we also have a visual arts section. And we will be turning 10 years old on the 21st of September of this year. It started as a group of young artists, who were pretty lost with what they wanted to do and how they wanted to do it, and so we got together throughout different types of art. And the concept was that, if in Paris, at the end of our various shows we would say “Rouge Rouge 3, Rouge Rouge 3, we are part of Rouge Rouge 3”, maybe that would eventually give us a platform were we could share each other’s information and grow together. The initial spark, sort of comes from this realisation that we are better working all together than competing with each other. And that was a very early decision and a defining factor. It had to be a participative collective, and a group that’s always looking to get to know and support emerging, alternative and independent art, building and offering a set of tools to help artists gain some form of professional status. I think that for art to exist today, it is a much better strategy to look at it like “we are all in this together” than to be looking at it as a competition, which in my opinion is much more destructive. It’s destructive for creativity, as I think creativity doesn’t come from seeing yourself as different but from seeing yourself as one. 

N: How did Le Cabaret Frigo come about?

B: So, obviously the first couple of weeks (of the lockdown) were very difficult. I think that was the case for all the artists in the collective. I guess the realisation that all live shows were going to be banned and maybe some of us were not going to work for a pretty long time started to hit our hopes. You know, in the second week we started hearing that the lockdown was going to go on and on, and even when it ended, we would not be able to immediately return to a normal type of relationship with our audiences. So that situation triggered a conversation where, well I guess the question was “what now? What can we do?” And actually many projects emerged from this. A group of four young artists formed a rock band because they ended up confined together, and they recorded 22 tracks during the lockdown. We had also some photographers who worked on a series of portraits and photos showcasing their daily experience. And then we had the collective song, which was called “song around the world”, where musicians from different parts of the world recorded a track together. And then there we started Cabaret Frigo. 

I guess the first problem was that we are not film directors, we are actors. We needed the camera to be fixed. We needed one shot, something easy that wouldn’t require anything except for the performers to do something. This had to be something could be done at home in a way that would be accessible for all. So we had various ideas, we first wanted to do Skype calls, and film them while doing sketches through the calls, but that became complicated to put together. And I don’t remember who around the table just went “what about if we just put a camera in the fridge?” And from there we though yeah that seems pretty easy! So we just contacted friends from all over the world and asked if they wanted to participate. And we got a lot of positive responses. In our first video for instance, the last performer is one of the actors from Alegria, from Le Cirque du Soleil, his name is Pablo Vermejo. And as he participated, the word got around and we started getting more and more videos in. And it all kind of just took off from there. Right now we have a huge bank of videos that it’s growing and growing so we have to go back to the editing to continue publishing these. 

N: In these sketches, you present the fridge as a central location within people’s households during the pandemic. Could you comment a bit on this concept? 

B: We thought that everybody would immediately recognise where they were as soon as the door opened. And so it set a space that was very clear for the audience and very familiar during this time. It gave us the possibility to do something intimate, something where actors didn’t really have to overthink their performances, and that was great. But the location and angle also carried a feeling of voyeurism, which contributed to the general concept. 

N: What was it like to collaborate online in this way? 

B: People were so generous, we were really surprised by the first episode and the creativity that was coming out of it. There was an Italian couple at the end of the third episode that just blew our minds: they sent us a one minute piece that we were very impressed with. So this was a great opening and it’s been an opportunity to just connect with new people. For instance with all of Julio’s friends. Julio is an Italian member of our collective and he’s connected us to a lot of his friends back home. Susana, who contacted her Spanish colleagues… And we met some English actors as well. So it’s already kind of started to have some world-wide artists who are just happy to contribute to this. And it’s had such a positive effect. Some people even sent us messages saying “thank you, I was really down and I didn’t know what to do with myself, and I just made that video and it all made a little more sense afterwards”. And that was very nice, you know? We felt that it reached exactly who it had to reach. Also, we are people that work on live performance, so video was not necessarily our medium. But it suddenly has become the only tool that was available for us to make something heard. This has become a different stage in which we can continue to perform. We are still artists, performers, and we will continue being part of the conversation, somehow.

N: One of the silver linings that have been widely commented over the past few months has been that, while the current crisis has forced people apart, it has also brought them together through collaborative projects such as yours. 

B: Isn’t that the beautiful thing about our times? These sort of things wouldn’t have been possible say 30 years ago. And that’s crazy! It’s wonderful that we were able to build these bridges at that moment. Our mindset has always been about opening the circle and opening creativity. And in this case opening the fridge. So for us there was no doubt. And I think that we need for art to continue bringing cultures together. We talk about globalisation and globalisation is always driven by the economic viewpoint. But globalisation also needs to be about sharing culture. And I guess that the internet is giving us that opportunity. 

Finally, for us it’s a way to not be completely useless, to hopefully reach some of the people fighting in the front lines. We were hoping that there would be a doctor or a nurse that would come across our project after a hard day at work and just be able to laugh for a second. Or you know, people working behind the counter at the supermarkets, scared, wearing their masks and their visors, worried to death of catching Covid and infecting their families at home. We hoped that somehow our videos would reach them and perhaps they could laugh for a minute. We thought “that’s our place, that’s the only thing we can do, to try and bring that moment forward”. It’s an attempt to take part, in our own way, in what’s going on around us.