BP Zoom is like the tune of a song whose name you don't know, but which you find yourself humming, two timeless, recurring characters who conjure up humour and poetry from a banal gesture or the most trivial situation.

Since 1992, the burlesque duo - Philippe Martz and Bernie Collins - have never stopped shaping their characters and putting them to the test in all their forms: theater, music hall, cabaret, in France and abroad, with the aim of taking the clown precisely where he's not expected.

They could have met at the Lecoq school alumni association, but it was in one of the dressing rooms at the Odéon theater that they discovered a common desire: to be simply funny through clowning.

The duo was forged around a number of references: Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, the Monthy Pythons and, as fellow travelers, figures such as Abel & Gordon and Bolek Polivka. With a few strong ideas too: to reduce speech and theatrical artifice to their simplest expression and, through the rhythm of bodies and the complicity of gesture, to reveal the drollery and incongruity of human attitudes, but also their aptitude for dreaming and poetry.

Theater of gesture and movement, clowning, object manipulation, music, Philippe Martz and Bernie Collins borrow from several disciplines to express their artistic universe: a presence, a clownish state.

This ongoing process of invention gave rise to the company's first stand-alone show, simply called BP Zoom. It was first presented at the Théâtre du Ranelagh (Paris) in 1997, then at the Festival d'Avignon in 1998 and at the London Mime Festival in 1999. This was to be the start of several tours of public theater networks in France, as well as in Latin America, Japan and Singapore, with the support of the AFAA.