Doing something completely different, starting all over again, breaking through isolation, practising, rehearsing, going back to school…
Situated on the outskirts, at the Cartoucherie de Vincennes, surrounded by its five theatres, whose spirit it shares, the ARTA institution seeks to be that kind of place, of school, one that is open to actors, dancers, singers from France or from abroad, with all kinds of professional backgrounds.
For the theater we dream of is one in which an actor would be not only a poet, but an ad-lib artist, a juggler or a dancer and a singer, or an acrobat, a martial-arts artist, and someone who can act, of course…
That is why we have sought to establish links between the performance traditions of each continent, in particular the asian continent, in order to stimulate training, to promote mutual recognition, to enable artists to discover other ways of working concretely…
Our workshops are directed by great masters, they last one month, and are independent of any production imperative.
Over the last year we've also launched another type of workshop, one-week worshops at regular intervals, aiming at furthering or pursuing a research led during one particular workshop with the same actors.

Two of these collective research workshops now exist.

The first one is centered around the epic form of acting which we began with Peking Opera artists Pei Yanling and Guo Jingchun. Our references are the techniques of classical chinese theatre, Bertolt Brecht and Charlie Chaplin.
The other project finds its origin in the work begun with Anatoli Vassiliev and Natalia Zvereva. It consists in a scenic exploration of the worlds of Gogol and Dostoievski, in the light of the russian school of actors, as initiated by Stanislavski and his successors.

Let us quote as an echo to these oriental schools, these words by Michael Tchekhov* : 
The actor must be aware of the plastic presence of his body,
As of the outline of his movements in space
Like a choreographer or a sculptor, the actor shapes forms.
When he realises this, he increases his expressive potential.

*Quoted, the 1st February 1999 by Nikolaï Karpov in its introductive workshop talk.at ARTA.