We are a theatre of directness, a theatre that speaks to its audience, that listens and needs a response. We believe that theatre is an event. We are a theatre of emotions - an immediate theatre - a theatre that excites and uses a direct language - a theatre of the imagination.
Theatre de la Jeune Lune was founded in France in 1978 by Parisians Dominique Serrand and Vincent Gracieux and Minneapolis native Barbra Berlovitz. The three were joined a short while later by Minneapolitan Robert Rosen. All are graduates of the renowned theatre school Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris, and jointly share the duties of Artistic Director. Steven Epp joined the company as Artistic Associate in 1983 and was asked to join the founders as co-Artistic Director in 2001.
Jeune Lune settled permanently in Minneapolis in 1985, after seven years of splitting their seasons between France and the United States. In the fall of 1992, after fourteen years of peripatetic performance, the company moved into its permanent home in the renovated Allied Van Lines cold storage building in the Minneapolis warehouse district. From its anchor, Jeune Lune has toured in recent years to such prestigious venues as the Yale Repertory Theater, the La Jolla Playhouse, Trinity Repertory Theatre, and the Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
The strong and tender care that the future shows for the past describes the dialectic that informs all of Jeune Lune's work: striving to link a past heritage of popular performance traditions - from circus and classical farce to commedia dell'arte and vaudeville - to a present function within the local community and the larger international community of cultural production. While embracing the 'old moon' of theatrical tradition, Jeune Lune seeks to create an entirely new kind of theatre that is immediate, high spirited, passionately physical, and visually spectacular.
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