Gabrielle Martin chats with Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutas (Bert and Nasi) who are presenting L'Addition at the 2025 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. L'Addition, directed by Tim Etchells, will be performed at the Alliance Française Vancouver on January 25 and 26 in association with Here & Now, and supported by the consulat général de France à Vancouver.

Show Notes

Gabrielle, Bert and Nasi discuss: 

• How did you come to know each other and begin your collaboration?

• What were the shifts and evolution of your work over the period of creating six shows together?

• What does it mean to work with a political message?

• What does it mean to occupy space and be in this world?

• In your "Less Workshop", you discuss using space for political and artistic negotiation. Do these ideas define your work?

• What has it meant to create work in the UK over the past 12 years of austerity?

• How do we prioritize simplicity when dealing with complex matters? How do we inject feelings into facts?

• What did it mean to work with Tim Etchells?

• What are the different ways to lead a creative process?

• What can people expect from the show or from the next work of yours?

About Bert and Nasi

Bert and Nasi are a contemporary performance duo that met in 2015 and have since created an entire repertoire of shows in the midst of a period of national and international austerity. Their work, in turn, is stripped back and minimalist, whilst dealing with complex ideas and emotions. Their shows lie somewhere between performance, dance and theatre but if you had to pin them down on it, they'd probably say it's theatre. 

Together they have performed their shows on the international stages of PuSh Festival (Canada), Festival de Otoño (Spain), Sarajevo Mess (Bosnia), Adelaide International Festival (Australia), InTeatro (Italy), Avignon Festival (France) as well as MiTsp (Brazil).

In 2020, Bert and Nasi received the Forced Entertainment Award in memory of Huw Chadbourn, which celebrates the work of contemporary artists reinventing theatre and performance in new ways and for new audiences.

Land Acknowledgement

This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.

Bert joined the conversation from Paris, while Nasi was in Marseille.

It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.

Show Transcript

 00:02

Hello and welcome to Push Play, a Push Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form. I'm Gabrielle Martin, Push's director of programming, and today's episode highlights doing less and injecting feelings into facts.

 

 00:17

I'm speaking with Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutas, performers and two of the creators of La Disson. A seemingly commonplace interaction between two men in a restaurant fractures into an absurdist kaleidoscope of shifting angles that reflect the comically nonsensical nature of life.

 

 00:35

La Disson will be presented at the Push Festival January 25 and 26, 2025. Bert and Nasi are a contemporary performance duo that met in 2015 and have since created an entire repertoire of shows in the midst of a period of national and international austerity.

 

 00:52

Their work, in turn, is stripped back and minimalist, though it deals with complex ideas and emotions. Tim Echols is the director of La Disson and is an artist and writer based in the UK, whose work shifts between performance, visual art, and fiction.

 

 01:06

Echols has worked in a wide variety of contexts, notably as the leader of the world-renowned Sheffield-based performance group, Forest Entertainment. Here's my conversation with Bert and Nasi. I do want to just start by acknowledging that I am joining this conversation from the traditional ancestral and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, the Musqueam Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh.

 

 01:33

I'm a settler here, and part of my responsibility as a settler is to continue to educate myself on the state of reconciliation, the history of genocide and colonization, and to continue to engage in decolonization efforts.

 

 01:54

There's always more we can do, but I really lean on the Yellowhead Institute here. which is an incredible resource of policies and reports, just tracking things like Canada's progress with regard to, for example, the truth and reconciliation calls to action.

 

 02:12

So I'm just gonna reference one of the more recent reports, a decade of disappointment, reconciliation in the system of a crown. And again, really just kind of reflecting on the 10 years since the 94 calls to action.

 

 02:28

And this report, I think it's really powerful. It talks about how reconciliation is not just about apologizing for past wrongs, at which Canada is quite adept. It's about ending current wrongs that are happening today and preventing future wrongs, both of which Canada fails to do, and that the legacy calls to action happen to be those with the least progress.

 

 02:51

And these are these four calls to action that, basically provide annual funding comparison metrics between indigenous and non-indigenous populations on and off reserve populations. And the logic of these calls is to clearly identify Canada's unwillingness to adequately invest resources to support indigenous communities over whom it has exerted control for the last 160 plus years.

 

 03:18

And I just really, this is a plug for Yellowhead and that's a report to check out. And it's just definitely frames things in such a powerful and honest way. Bert and Nasi, where are you joining the call today from?

 

 03:34

So I'm actually in Paris because we went to see with Nasi, but Nasi is already in Marseille, but we went to see our friends, Forced Entertainment, perform in Paris, their latest show for their 40th anniversary called Signal to Noise.

 

 03:55

I don't know if you already saw it. I haven't seen it, but I've been following. It's exciting. Yeah. Read about it. It's a great show and there's a lot of moments when you laugh, but there's also a hot moment when you kind of despair what's happening on stage as well, because it echoes brilliantly with a lot of foreign political contexts.

 

 04:21

And yeah, it's pre