Marc Felix Marcelo was born on October 21st, 1997 in the suburbs of Manila, where he discovered both his love for his grandmother and for food. As a child, he imagined becoming a singer, an astronaut, or a professional eater.
In the summer of 2003, he arrived in France and became Marc-Félix Fournier. There, he learned how to use a knife to cut his food, to chew with his mouth closed, and not to burp at the table.
Marc-Félix first trained his body through martial arts: boxing, Muay Thai, and sport shooting.
By chance, he pushed open the door of a cinema and discovered Raging Bull by Martin Scorsese. Shortly after, he came across Doolittle by the Pixies. These encounters led him to pick up a camera and an electric guitar. He then imagined himself telling stories or becoming a rock star.
Alongside his film studies at the University of Strasbourg, he practiced capoeira and decided to become an acrobat, while spending his evenings shouting into microphones and playing metal strings through saturated amplifiers.
At Le Plus Petit Cirque du Monde, a teacher once told him he didn’t have an acrobat’s body. A logical remark, since Marc-Félix instead has the body of a boxer, a capoeirista, a sport shooter, and a rock star. He continued his training on the Chinese pole at the École de Cirque Jules Verne in Amiens, notably with Adrian Munteanu.
At the Centre National des Arts du Cirque (CNAC), he met artists who helped him learn how to tell stories, such as Mathieu Desseigne, Lucien Reynès, Sylvain Bouillet from Naïf Production (a collective dedicated to live performance and shared adventures), and multidisciplinary artist Claudio Stelatto.
There, he realized that his love for his grandmother, cinema, and punk music inspire him far more than he had thought. On a stage and a Chinese pole, he imagines himself as a sword-fighting hero, boxer, filmmaker, astronaut, or rock star—mainly enjoying the act of diverting references from the many mediums that nourish him. And in the middle of it all, he still hasn’t given up on becoming a professional eater.