In a set inspired by the North American Rockies, the figure of the cowboy is setting, like the sun in a John Ford movie. The Marlboro cowboy fills the cinematographic space with his presence, like a ghost of which only the empty shape remains.
In this lunar desert, recreating the atmosphere of a cowboy settlement, the audience is invited to enter, to gaze, to drift.
Cowboys Don’t Cry is a sort of solo on adulthood, on maturity, on a white man getting to his fifties with all his outdated values, played by Raphaël Defour. Far from an autobiography, this fiction with a detached point of view will explore the representation of a wandering old guard through a caustic satire. Funny, sometimes stupid, while in the meantime on a knife-edge, Cowboys Don’t Cry will face philosophical questions on our relationships with death, loneliness, heritage. From improvisation to performance, from the whip to the spoken word, this hermit will remind us how the cowboy still haunts our collective imagination today, despite his now meaningless quest.

Raphaël Defour is stage director and actor for Points de Suture in Lausanne (CH) and Microserfs in Lyon (FR).
Through a rather eclectic career in terms of artistic disciplines, he’s experimenting with the connexions between stage performance, music and writing as an actor and musician, and later as a director, author and project leader. He currently run two stage companies, Microserfs in Lyon and Points de Suture, based in Lausanne, which enables me to develop work around contemporary performance and writing.
He mostly work on those through experiences on stage but with the different codes of concerts, talks, visual installation, solo work… Not really in a transdisciplinary way but rather as a means to merge and blur them all.
He’s artist resident at the Ménagerie de Verre, at the Point Ephémère, at the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers in Paris ; at the Fabrique in Rouen. Performances and shows at La Perrera Arte (Santiago du Chili), at the Comédie de Saint-Etienne, at the Croiseur, at l’Elysée, at NTH8, at the Galerie Néon in Lyon, at the Point Ephémère in Paris, at Arsenic in Lausanne, at the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris, at the Belluard Festival in Fribourg, at the TLH in Sierre, at Scène Nationale le Carreau in Forbach, at the Pavillon Mazar in Toulouse, at Un festival in Villerville, at the Théâtre de Vaulx-en-Velin, at Le Lavoir in Lyon and at Arsenic in Lausanne.
Stage direction of the play Merci la Nuit at the Théâtre des Célestins in Lyon in 2020.
Actor of stage and movies, he worked with Pierre Huygue, Bruno Meyssat, Eric Vautrin, Yves-Noël Genod, Julien Mages, Catherine Hargreaves, David Moccelin, Thierry Bordereau, Massimo Furlan, Arpad Shilling, Yuval Pick, Laurent Fréchuret, Alex Pou, Denis Dercourt, Agnès Jaoui and Christophe Honoré… as well as with the collectif La Vie Brève. He now work with Yoann Bourgeois.