Born in 1972, Julie Kretzschmar is a stage director who lives and works in Marseille. At a very young age she began inventing and performing stories in an idyllic place in the Cévennes, where her father and others created imaginary worlds and told stories about them to a community of foster children and the families of well-known artists. She trained at the Conservatoire d’Art Dramatique in Montpellier, and in 2001 founded “l’Orpheline est une épine dans le pied” [literally “orphan girls are a drag”], a company partnered with Les Bancs Publics in Marseille.
She also studied law for a long time, and began a thesis on the philosophy of law. She has travelled a lot over the last twenty years, especially in the Arab world and Africa. Julie Kretzschmar bases her work on conversations with writers—usually novelists rather than playwrights. She worked with Mustapha Benfodil, adapting hus novel Archéologie du chaos (amoureux) to produce several public reading formats presented in Marseille and Algeria (2010). In 2011 she presented De mon hublot utérin je te salue humanité et te dis blablabla [from the porthole of my womb I salute you, humanity, and say blah blah blah] at the Théâtre des Salins in Martigues. She also worked with Kamel Daoud and Alain Kamal Martial in 2012. In 2013, working with an artistic team of 35 people, she presented Kara’, a Comorian epic commissioned by Marseille-Provence 2013 – European Capital of Culture, adapted from a text by the storyteller Salim Hatubou.
