Jérôme Michez
Jérôme Michez is a playwright, director and actor, born in 1990 and based in Brussels. He trained at INSAS in theatrical writing after training as an actor at the Conservatoire Royal de Bruxelles.
His stage work is based on the question of what it is like to be there together in a room, watching a few people do something. He recognises the relationship with others as the beginning of the political gesture, and is looking for the non-consensual forms this relationship can take during a performance. Emptiness and uncertainty play an important part in this. His creations reflect both the impulse to reach out to others and the need to reflect.
In 2018, he began stage research with Elsa Rauchs, with whom he is exploring the limits of all forms of representation. This research took shape in AMER | AMER, a performance for an actor and a guest from the audience, premiered at the Théâtre d’Esch (Luxembourg) in January 2022, and performed again at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles in Paris and at the WET°7 festival at the Théâtre Olympia – CDN Tours in 2023.
He is working closely with Laure Lapel as dramaturge, first on La Place, premiered at the Théâtre Océan Nord (Brussels) in 2022 and nominated in the Best Direction category at the Prix Maeterlinck de la Critique 2023; then on L’Autre Projet, to be premiered at the Théâtre Océan Nord in 2025. These two works explore the place left by major property and urban development projects for those who have no part in them.
As an actor, Jérôme has mainly worked in non-dedicated spaces: with the Teatro de Los Sentidos collective in Tissant Mons (2015), in former mining administration offices; with the collective creation Projet Nomade (2014, 2015, 2017) in a caravan; at KANAL – Centre Pompidou with Le Monde-Sans-Envers-Et-Sans-Endroit (2020); and with Elsa Rauchs and Claire Wagener in Doheem – Fragments d’Intimité (2022) in the former Arcelor-Mittal steelworks in Esch-sur-Alzette.
As a performer, he investigates notions of presence, restraint and necessity. He is exploring these notions further through his practice of butoh, which he has been developing since 2019, mainly with Masaki Iwana and Moeno Wakamatsu. In 2021 and 2022, he worked as a performer with Lucia Palladino in I’ve discovered that loving means going back to repetition (Buda Kunstcentrum, Courtrai).
In 2024, he took part in the Constellations programme initiated by CIFAS, leading a cross-disciplinary reflection between artists from different disciplines working in the public space, guided by the artist Anna Rispoli. He is also taking part in the dramaturgy seminar run by Camille Louis at La Bellone.
