Aurélien Bory, Oliver Alenda and Katja Werhlin founded Company 111 (named after Beethoven’s last sonata) in 1999.

Already in their first shows they combine circus techniques with accentuated light and sound design, mixing music with non-verbal theatre, acrobatic skills, joggling, video and all the while creating plastic but abstract fantasies. They aim towards a high but modest aesthetics that is in constant transition from contemplative restraint to flashing effects, from the stark and clear to the magnificent. Their work is characterised by a group dynamic and through collaborations with directors of opposing aesthetic views to their own.

In September 2000 Cie 111 started their trilogy dedicated to space. Plan B, the second part of the trilogy was realised by the American director Phil Soltanoff. The production started in January 2003 and the end of the trilogy is planed for 2005 with the show More or Less Unlimited. The starting point for all three shows is an a priori scenographic argument that provokes inconsistent effects and divides space on its elements: line, plane and volume.

IJK, the first part of the trilogy takes the cube as its subject and exposes it in all its specificities. Work on the show helped them discover a rhythm and melody of joggling and introduced them to new perspectives towards this classic discipline.
With Plan B, that will be presented at Eurokaz this year, they enter into a research of plane, that they attempt to conquer as a unique field of possibilities. It’s about embracing plane. In the first place this is a work on the space that we enclose by acrobats and joggling. Rule number 1 is that there are no dispensable elements.
Light, sound record, everything is precisely gathered up to perfection in constant interaction - with these words Aurélien Bory tries to explain their unique project. Phil Soltanoff adds that their work is constructed collectively; it starts with motion while the text is then finally added to the global construction.

The work is constructed on two axis: the abstract one that springs from a theatre of motion, a geometry of sensitive bodies and balls as sign-posts, and the other concrete one that develops the idea of plane as a perspective of life, as a project guided by personal dreams which connect desire and its realisation. Acrobats, jogglers and musicians touch through circus skills two consecutive dreams and learn how to break universal laws. Division of motion leads to film and photography and so on to the works of Muybridge and Marey. The link between plane and image relentlessly appear, and video work propels a dialogue that supports a dream atmosphere that organically follows their bodies and moves.

Cie 111 finds inspiration in different artistic movements of the 20th century - Bauhaus, constructivism and American silent movies. Plan B copes with an intimacy with everyday secrets and presents them to a wide public with a playful lightness of touch. The conception of Plan B offers the director's interest in the possibilities of abstract theatre based on geometry, musicality and the actors’ abilities of communicating without words.

Critics have praised Plan B with their inventiveness, strange mixes of genre, astonishing technical perfection, and a humour and poetry that touches Ikar's dream.