LA QUESTION DES AMATEURS ET DES PROFESSIONNELS À L'USINE HOLLANDER À CHOISY-LE-ROI  
Sylvie Roques, Patrice Bigel, 

The project of the company is singular in many respects : choice of an unusual place of performance : a former industrial site,  the Hollander factory in Choisy-le-Roi ; choice of new angles of experiment, by crossing amateurs’ and professionals‘ practices ; choice of a variety of  projects’ contents, by mixing dance and theater. Such choices denote a discipline in full evolution and push away the usually hermetic borders between two antagonistic fields of the same artistic practice: the amateurs and the professionals.
Similar desire of crossing to which is added an educational ambition: the animation of workshops with high school students, in partnership with the local éducation office of Créteil. The challenge of the project is to maintain a unity despite  the variety of themes and actors...
Today, the authorings of the company La Rumeur are inseparable from the Hollander factory of Choisy-le-Roi. Now, this place distances itself straightaway from traditional spaces of  live performance. Place of an industrial memory, the Hollander factory sheltered  for a long time the Hollander‘s tanning, created  in 1796 by Mr Fauler.
Other companies followed it on this vast space of three hectares. The company La Rumeur settles in the Factory in 1995, which it uses at first as a storage place for sets and costumes. The company finds there an opened space where various meetings and new experiments  are possible. The place becomes a laboratory for theatrical creation, such as it has been imagined in the late 90s.
 A parallel can be drawn between the transformation of this former industrial site into a factory of imagination and a movement which began at the beginning of the 80s in France and from the 70s in England, in Germany and in Holland, which consisted in occupying disused industrial places and in reconverting them into places of production, of distribution and reception of different forms of art. Arousing the interest of the Ministry of Culture, the emergence of such new atypical cultural facilities has been the object of a request for a report, in which the Hollander factory and the team animated by Patrice Bigel hold attention.
The project bends at the end of the 90s to reorganize the set and welcome a public.
In November, 2002, the Hollander factory is totally rehabilitated… The development of the premises allows then to give flexibility, or even a bigger freedom, to the scenography. What increases the possibilities, transforms the audience’s position , and multiplies the opportunities for interaction : " we can play in the hall, in the courtyard or make itinerant propositions. The utopian character of Hollander is due to the possibility to make up a specific scenography for each creation and to play, as long as there is an audience ". Now, emancipation towards spatial rules is also an emancipation towards social rules. Especially widening the public by making them participate:  « the desire to jam the professional routine, an urge for strong commitment, the necessity to reach other audiences ".

Sylvie Roques, Revue Communications. 2008 Seuil