Gisèle Vienne
Artist, Choreographer, and Theater Director, France
Gisèle Vienne is a Franco-Austrian artist, choreographer, and theatre director. After studying philosophy and music, she trained at the Ecole Supérieure Nationale des Arts de la Marionnette. Since then, she has been working regularly with, among other collaborators, the writer Dennis Cooper. For the past 20 years, her plays and choreographies have toured Europe and are regularly performed in Asia and America, including I Apologize (2004), Kindertotenlieder (2007), Jerk (2008) This is how you will disappear (2010), LAST SPRING: A Prequel (2011), The Ventriloquists Convention (2015) and Crowd (2017). In 2020 she created with Etienne Bideau-Rey the fourth version of Showroomdummies at the Rohm Theater Kyoto, a piece originally created in 2001. Gisèle Vienne regularly exhibits her photographs in museums such as the Whitney Museum in New York, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires. She has published two books, Jerk / Through Their Tears in collaboration with Dennis Cooper, Peter Rehberg, and Jonathan Capdevielle in 2011, and 40 Portraits 2003-2008, in collaboration with Dennis Cooper and Pierre Dourthe in February 2012. Her work has been the subject of several publications and the original soundtracks of her pieces have been featured on several albums.
Her latest show L'Etang, based on the text by Robert Walser Der Teich, premiered at the Théâtre National de Bretagne in Rennes in November 2020.
Elsa Dorlin and Gisèle Vienne initiated at the Camargo Foundation a collaboration based on a common reflection on the frameworks of perception, and in particular on the perception of violence. These perspectives work on the gap, the crudeness and the dissonant: they are critical of language, representation and commonly accepted meanings of shared reality. During the residency at The Camargo Foundation, the exchanges led to the recording of a dialogue between them, which became a series of podcasts produced by the Centre National de la Danse, where the exchange continues, in particular through a reflection on the history and philosophy of dance. The collaboration will continue with the Camargo Foundation: in this space-time of reflection and creation, echoing works, artistic and political alliances and paths, a movement, a critical chorus, are woven over the long term.
This series of three podcasts is produced by Cécil Chaignot. The texts are read by Adèle Haenel. The podcast is in French and is available here.