A painter since the age of 16, Éric Champoux has always taken a keen interest in light.
Since graduating from the National Theatre School of Canada in 1997, Éric has designed the lighting for more than 60 theatre productions in Quebec and Europe. He has worked with such Quebec directors as André Brassard, Gilles Champagne, Alice Ronfard, René Richard Cyr, Claude Poissant and Yves Desgagnés.
For the last dozen or so years, Éric has worked particularly closely with Wajdi Mouawad, lighting his productions of Rêves, Les Troyens, Le Mouton et la Baleine, The Three Sisters, Incendies, Fôrets, and, most recently, Seuls.
Éric designed the lighting for Alice Ronfard’s 2006 production Désordre Public at Théâtre Espace Go, where he also lit La Promesse de l'aube and Les hommes aiment-ils le sexe, vraiment, autant qu'ils le disent? created by a collective
of writers and directors.
In his mission to bring the art of the real – and the unreal – to the audience, Éric is constantly seeking to improve his mastery of painting with the medium of light.
"I paint light onto bodies and objects,” he says. “I create a luminous image on stage exactly the same way I paint, layer by layer, revealing the characters on a canvas of colour. Both results are based on the same approach."
OVO marks the first time Éric has worked on Cirque du Soleil show. “My first inspiration was the big top itself,” he says. “I wanted to make use of the apparatus and equipment in the centre, the four masts and the set elements located way in the background. I started by designing on paper from the very beginning of the project, and that’s how I continued to work, looking at the stage as a whole, and observing how dance and the harmony of colours play off each other."
Éric Champoux was born in Val-d'Or, Quebec, in 1975.