Trained at the École régionale d’acteurs de Cannes and then at the Conservatoire national supérieur d’art dramatique de Paris, Cyril Teste founded the Collectif MxM, a modular creative hub of artists and technicians, with Julien Boizard and Nihil Bordures in 2000, and became its artistic director. Influenced by painting and theatre and inspired by the worlds of Bill Viola, Bruce Naumann, Robert Wilson and Romeo Castellucci, he brings the eye of a writer, visual artist and videographer to the stage.
Since 2011, he has collaborated with Collectif MxM on a new form of filmmaking called “film performance”, which combines filming, editing, colour grading and sound mixing in real-time in front of a live audience.
Patio, based on Olivia Rosenthal’s On n’est pas là pour disparaître, Park, Nobody, an in-situ and stage film performance inspired by the writings of Falk Richter, and Festen by Thomas Vinterberg and Mogens Rukov, have laid the foundation for a style of stage writing grounded in a constantly evolving cinematographic device. During the 2018-2019 season, he directed his first opera, Hamlet by Ambroise Thomas, at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, followed by Opening Night based on the screenplay by John Cassavetes with Isabelle Adjani. Since 2009, Teste and Collectif MxM have spearheaded the Laboratoire Nomade d’Arts Scéniques, a network that fosters transdisciplinary transmission between performance venues and higher education institutions in the fields of the dramatic arts, visual arts, technology and sciences within a particular region. In 2020, he created La Mouette, freely adapted from Anton Chekhov’s autobiographical work, The Seagull, with Collectif MxM. The play was presented at the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers in 2022. In May 2024, at Bonlieu Scène nationale, they created Sur l’Autre rive, based on Anton Chekhov’s play Platonov.