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Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne

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L'Étang

Gisèle Vienne

L'Étang

Adapted from "Der Teich" by Robert Walser

Fritz thinks he is unloved by his mother, so he fakes a drowning to test her love for him. Gisèle Vienne directs this text by Robert Walser with Adèle Haenel and Ruth Vega Fernandez.

Fritz thinks he is unloved by his mother, so he fakes a drowning to test her love for him. Gisèle Vienne directs this text by Robert Walser with Adèle Haenel and Ruth Vega Fernandez. They reveal the contradictory emotions of the characters, through words, bodies and even silences.

L'Étang is a short early text, addressed by the writer from Bienne to his own sister, and is the only text written by the author in the Bernese dialect. It tells the story of a teenage boy who seeks proof of his mother's love, to the point of staging his suicide.

Gisèle Vienne, a choreographer and puppeteer by training, is one of those artists who pay attention to turmoil, unspoken fantasies, unconscious or reproduced brutality: to that dark territory of existence where the most sensual and engaging aspects of life rub shoulders with violence. The stage of her theatre exposes what the regulations of social life try to control, bury or silence – but which is all the more intemperate in its expression.

In L'Étang, as close as possible to Walser and her performers, Gisèle Vienne details Fritz's game, caught between illusions and reality, fantasy and violence. Without looking for what might explain a mother's uneasy love or the teenager's theatrical and funereal gesture, she patiently unfolds the situations and emotions of the characters. Dissociating voice and text, body, face and music, she thus exposes the ingredients of young Fritz's contradictory passions. Like Walser, she appeals to a sensitive and embodied intelligence that is attracted to nuance and paradox. A hallucinatory, sensual and disturbing theatrical phantasmagoria.

From 4 to 12 May 2021
Durée:
~1h30
Pavillon

Theatre

Dates and times

Tuesday, May 4, 2021 - 7:00pm
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Tue 04.05 19h00
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Wednesday, May 5, 2021 - 8:00pm
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Wed 05.05 20h00
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Thursday, May 6, 2021 - 7:00pm
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Thu 06.05 19h00
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Friday, May 7, 2021 - 8:00pm
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Fri 07.05 20h00
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Saturday, May 8, 2021 - 6:00pm
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Sat 08.05 18h00
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Monday, May 10, 2021 - 7:00pm
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Mon 10.05 19h00
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Tuesday, May 11, 2021 - 7:00pm
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Tue 11.05 19h00
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Wednesday, May 12, 2021 - 8:00pm
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Wed 12.05 20h00
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Meet the artists: Thu. 6.05 at the end of the show
 

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Tickets, timetables and detailed information
Gisèle Vienne

Director

Gisèle Vienne

Gisèle Vienne est une artiste, chorégraphe et metteuse en scène franco-autrichienne. Après des études de philosophie et de musique, elle intègre l’Ecole nationale supérieure des arts de la marionnette de Charleville-Mézières où elle rencontre Etienne Bideau-Rey avec qui elle crée ses premières pièces. Dès 2004, elle poursuit ses projets personnels, qu’elle conçoit dans le cadre de collaborations fidèles, notamment avec l’écrivain Dennis Cooper, les musiciens Peter Rehberg et Stephen O'Malley et l’éclairagiste Patrick Riou. Depuis près de vingt ans, elle explore ainsi les liens entre spirituel, violence, érotisme et pulsions refoulées. Ses spectacles ou installations jouent du trouble entre fantasme et réalité et proposent une expérience troublante aux évocations aussi archaïques que contemporaines et qui, par le processus de transfiguration artistique, met à jour une certaine vérité de soi et de notre civilisation. À Vidy, elle présente Crowd en 2018.

From the same artist
Crowd
Learn more
© Estelle Hanania
© Estelle Hanania
© Estelle Hanania
© Estelle Hanania
Credits

Text
Der Teich (L’Étang) by Robert Walser

French translation
Lucie Taïeb, from the German translation
by Händl Klaus et Raphael Urweider (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2014)

Concept, dramaturgy, direction and scenography
Gisèle Vienne

Musical direction
Stephen F. O’Malley

Original music
Stephen F. O’Malley
François J. Bonnet

Lighting
Yves Godin

Tour assistant
Sophie Demeyer

Outside Eye
Dennis Cooper
Anja Röttgerkamp

Set construction
Nanterre-Amandiers CDN

Set and props
Gisèle Vienne
Camille Queval
Guillaume Dumont

Costumes
Gisèle Vienne
Camille Queval

Make-up and wigs
Mélanie Gerbeaux

With
Adèle Haenel
Ruth Vega Fernandez

Production:
DACM - Compagnie Gisèle Vienne

Coproduction
Nanterre-Amandiers CDN Théâtre National de Bretagne Maillon, Théâtre de Strasbourg Holland Festival Fonds Transfabrik Ruhrtriennale Comédie de Genève Le Manège, Scène nationale de Reims Centre Culturel André Malraux MC2 : Grenoble Tandem Scène nationale Kaserne Basel International Summer Festival Kampnagel Hamburg La Filature, Scène nationale de Mulhouse Festival d’Automne à Paris Théâtre Garonne CCN2, Centre Chorégraphique national de Grenoble BIT Teatergarasjen Black Box Teater

With the support of
La Colline, théâtre national CND Centre national de la danse

Dedicated to Kerstin Daley-Baradel

Press and Pro
Consult and download various documents related to the show: press file, HD photos, press reviews and more.

Photos HD

Download ZIP
VIDY+

Meet the artists
Thursday 6.05
at the end of the show

+

ROBERT WALSER

Writer

Robert Walser is both an essential and marginal figure in the history of world literature of the past century. Born in Bienne in 1878, found dead in the snow on Christmas Day of 1956 near the psychiatric clinic in Herisau where he had been interned, he was a novelist, poet and playwright, modest and withdrawn but admired by his peers including Franz Kafka, Robert Musil and Walter Benjamin. Walser explored the workings of the fairy tale, even in his novels, attentive to those minute details of existence that blend into dreamlike drifting. He observed his surroundings with a delicate attention, without denying their strangeness and without seeking after secret truths, like a surprising spectacle. His life – like those of his heroes, often judged "worthless" by themselves – was nevertheless inhabited by a gentle lightness of heart, which distinguishes Walser's texts from all others. L'Étang is a text that is also out of place in an already singular body of work, a private text intended for his sister, but in which, as is often the case with him, autobiography blends into the narrative, making it impossible to disentangle facts and dreams, penned in a literary style that is as elaborate as it is allusive.

Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne

Directeur Vincent Baudriller

Avenue Gustave Doret

CH-1007 Lausanne

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Administration +41 21 619 45 44

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