Vienne, Gisele

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    At Theatertreffen, the Hobbits Are Yodeling

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    A quirky and joyful play based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s books joined weightier works at this year’s Theatertreffen drama festival.“Where is Frodo?” an actress dressed as Gollum asked as she crawled past me, sounding slightly panic stricken. It was the first thing I heard when I entered “Gigantic in Middle-earth” (“Riesenhaft in Mittelerde”), an ambitious immersive theatrical experience inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.” The work is one of 10 productions selected for this year’s Theatertreffen, the annual springtime celebration of the best of German theater. To step inside the elaborate staging, which originated at the Schauspielhaus Zürich, in Switzerland, was to plunge headlong into a lovingly prepared yet scrappy version of Tolkien’s fantasy world. As much a playful examination of Tolkien superfandom as it was a retelling of the author’s saga, the show came to life humorously, energetically and sometimes epically with music, puppetry, video, dramatic light, swirling fog and blowing leaves. The audience is in the midst of the action, sitting and standing among the nearly 20 constantly moving performers.The forces required for this extravaganza, a collaboration between Schauspielhaus Zürich, Theater HORA and the Helmi puppet theater, were monumental. The show boasted four directors, including one of the Schauspielhaus’s artistic leaders, Nicolas Stemann, who also played piano throughout the evening. “Gigantic in Middle-earth” is a collaboration between Schauspielhaus Zürich, Theater HORA and the Helmi puppet theater.Fabian SchellhornThe most memorable performances came from members of Theater HORA. The Swiss company, which works with actors with cognitive and developmental disabilities, has recently been featured in weighty productions at the Salzburg Festival in Austria and in Liège, Belgium, that explored the challenges of living with Down syndrome and other conditions. Here, it was pure joy to watch HORA’s actors embrace their inner hobbits, dwarves, wizards, orcs and elves — including one that yodels!We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Passion of Adèle Haenel, an Artist of Fierce Political Conviction

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      Haenel, working with the choreographer-director Gisèle Vienne in “L’Étang,” is trying to “pierce through the surface of things.”The actress Adèle Haenel bristled when asked what drew her to radical art and politics. “The term ‘radical’ is used as a way to discredit protest discourse,” said Haenel, who is best known in the United States for the 2019 art-house hit “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” That was also one of the last feature films she worked on. Since then, she has opted to dramatically alter the course of her life and career.Over the past few years, Haenel, 34, has become one of the most visible and committed faces of the #MeToo movement in France. In May, she wrote an open letter published in the influential French culture weekly Télérama to explain her absence from movie screens: “I decided to politicize my retirement from cinema to denounce the general complacency of the profession toward sexual aggressors and more generally the way in which this sphere collaborates with the mortal, ecocidal, racist order of the world such as it is.”She has, she told me, “a political understanding of the world, and my actions are consistent with it as much as possible. Calling someone radical is a way to say ‘She’s hysterical, she’s angry.’ I prefer coherent to radical.”I said that I had used the word in a positive way — to suggest bold choices that steered clear of the artistic mainstream. “I’m not annoyed with you,” Haenel said. “I’m reacting strongly, but it’s just to make myself clear.”Making herself clear is important to Haenel, who has an intense focus and frequently looked to the side as we talked, as if to better organize her thoughts away from an interlocutor’s gaze. She sometimes wrote down points she wanted to come back to later — and she did return to them.We were talking in a house on the bucolic campus of PS21: Performance Spaces for the 21st Century, in Chatham, N.Y., where Haenel was appearing in the director-choreographer Gisèle Vienne’s show “L’Étang.” The show comes next to New York City for performances at New York Live Arts, Saturday through Monday, as part of the Dance Reflections festival.By American theatrical standards, “L’Étang” (“The Pond”) is pretty close to radical, though. Based on a short play by the Swiss-German writer Robert Walser, the dance-theater piece locks Haenel and Julie Shanahan, a longtime member of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble, in a helix of escalating tension performed in often excruciatingly slow motion, a tempo familiar to those who saw Vienne’s hypnotic “Crowd” last year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Haenel takes on multiple roles, most notably that of Fritz, an adolescent who fakes suicide to attract his mother’s attention, and his two siblings; Shanahan plays their parents. The atmosphere is somewhat hallucinatory — Vienne has cited David Lynch among her influences — but it requires consummate precision, both physical and emotional.“We worked a lot on trying to pierce through the surface of things, and that’s not something you can do alone,” Haenel said. “Among the people onstage, we tried to better understand what’s implied, to understand a person’s feelings. You start anticipating when a person is going to stop moving. That’s a kind of communication I feel very strongly with Julie. We don’t need to talk about it endlessly; I just feel how long she’s going to take to do something.”For Vienne, effort is an integral part of the process. “What I do is very technical from a choreographic and interpretive standpoint,” she said in Chatham. “This virtuosity is the result of a long physical and theoretical training — sociology, philosophy and politics are important to understanding what we’re in the process of building, and the formal choices we make as we create the piece.”This rigor and commitment suit Haenel, as she passionately pursues a path in which artistic goals are intertwined with politics and life, a dedication that coalesces in her work with Vienne.The two met in 2018, when they were on the admissions committee for the National Theater of Brittany’s acting school. Haenel participated in a workshop with prospective students led by Vienne. “I loved it,” she said. “The improvisation was related to her show ‘Crowd’ and involved developing slow motion as a new sense, like seeing or hearing, that would allow you to live or experience things differently.”Making herself clear: Haenel, who has retired from the movie business, has collaborated with Vienne on a few projects. “At the heart of ‘L’Étang,’” Haenel said, “is the issue of violence.”Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesThe pair further explored that theme in “L’Étang,” which became their first official collaboration and, after a Covid 19-imposed delay, premiered in 2021. Over the course of our conversation, Haenel often circled back to what she referred to as de-hierarchization. In the show, for example, words, movement, music, sound and lighting all contribute to communicating information, feelings and emotions. This undermines the traditional place of text at the top of the theatrical pyramid, and makes us reconsider what carries meaning onstage.And “L’Étang” subverts the usual link between the performers’ body language and the way text is delivered — especially since the voices are often electronically distorted. (Adrien Michel did the sophisticated sound design.)“It’s about the friction between text and subtext,” Haenel said. She brought up an especially intense scene in which she and Shanahan are face to face. They barely move, but the effect is one of terrifying brutality. “Julie actually speaks very calmly, but for us it’s a crazy scene of aggression because there is a negation of the body language,” Haenel said, adding that something they explored with Vienne was dissociation. “We’ve achieved a level where we can have a body that looks almost stoned with a speeded-up voice.”The impact is intended to be as much political as it is aesthetic. “At the heart of ‘L’Étang’ is the issue of violence,” Haenel said, “and this violence is not about saying tough things, but about turning someone else’s speech into silence.”Haenel and Vienne’s partnership has bloomed since 2018. In August, they premiered a new show, “Extra Life,” also starring Theo Livesey and Katia Petrowick, at the prestigious Ruhrtriennale festival in Germany. They are also involved with public readings of work by Monique Wittig, the lesbian philosopher and activist who died in 2003 and has been enjoying a revival in France over the past few years. While in New York for “L’Étang,” Haenel is participating in a Wittig event on Wednesday at the Albertine bookstore, which its organizers conceived in collaboration with Vienne.“Talking about Monique Wittig is a political act of active memory creation,” said Haenel, who is trying to get new English translations of Wittig’s work off the ground. “I’d love to help her be read again in the United States, to be studied more.”Digging deep with Vienne and championing Wittig are of a piece for Haenel. “I’ve always tried to engage in a thinking process,” she said. “The idea is not so much to become better, but not to become calcified in an antiquated relationship to the world. What’s at stake is not whether that relationship is truer or not — I find the idea of a criteria of truth super-problematic — but whether it’s more alive or not. At least for me.” More

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      At the Ruhrtrienniale, Industrial Ruins Become Stages

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      The best productions at the Ruhrtriennale festival created a sense of unity with their unique, often vast, settings.For six weeks each year, the Ruhrtriennale festival transforms the economically depressed Ruhr region of northwest of Germany into ground zero for cutting edge art and performance.Since 2002, this lavishly funded event, which puts on roughly 30 productions each summer, has lured artists and audiences to Germany’s rust belt with its robust and unexpected programming. And whereas many of Europe’s summer arts festivals can feel interchangeable, the Ruhrtriennale is devoted to works that can’t be experienced the same way anywhere else. Many have been created specifically for the postindustrial sites that dot the region.Earlier this month, the Ruhrtriennale’s artistic director Barbara Frey inaugurated her third and final festival program with her own staging of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” presented in the Kraftzentrale, the cavernous former power station of a disused steel and coal plant. It was the opening salvo in an interdisciplinary program, running through Sept. 23, that includes an immersive production of a Janacek opera and an art installation in a Brutalist church.The desolate set for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” designed by Martin Zehetgruber, features rusting cars half-sunken in the earth and sparse trees that suggest Shakespeare’s enchanted forest is on the verge of collapse. This is a gloomy “Midsummer,” both visually (thanks to Rainer Küng’s lighting) and atmospherically, and while it is enlivened by fine acting by a troupe of 10 performers, the production itself is oddly sterile and detached. Dorothee Hartinger’s wry and insouciant Puck and Oliver Nägele’s gruff and bittersweet Bottom are standouts. However, most of the time, the actors, drawn largely from the permanent ensemble at the Burgtheater, in Vienna, recite Shakespeare’s text with fine, crisp diction, but without truly inhabiting their characters.Cast members from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” from left: Meike Droste, Marie-Luise Stockinger, Sabine Haupt, Markus Scheumann, Sylvie Rohrer, Gunther Eckes, Oliver Nägele and Langston Uibe.Matthias Horn/Ruhrtriennale 2023For a play that dances on the threshold between dream and waking, and art and reality, Frey’s production feels like a slow waltz. (The frequent music box-like tinkering by an onstage musician quickly grew tiring.) There is much to admire, but little to quicken the pulse.I missed the site specificity of the festival’s most memorable productions. When Florentina Holzinger staged “A Divine Comedy” at the Kraftzentrale, in 2021, she made fuller use of the space to create an infernal cabaret-variety show. Although I was not a fan of that production, I must admit that Holzinger’s spectacularly overstuffed staging, featuring joyriding motorcycles and cars, and even a grand piano suspended from the ceiling, was visually stunning. By contrast, Frey’s production, which will transfer to the Burgtheater in September, seems designed for any theater with a rotating stage.There was greater sense of unity between the production and the venue at the world premiere of Gisèle Vienne’s “Extra Life,” at the Salzlager, in the city of Essen.Two years ago Vienne, a distinctive French choreographer and director, was at the Ruhr with her clammy and hallucinatory chamber piece “L’Étang” (“The Pond”). While that previous work was insistently small-scale, with two actors playing 10 roles on a mostly bare set, “Extra Life” embraces the vastness of a former salt storage facility.From left: Theo Livesey, Katia Petrowick and Adele Haenel in “Extra Life,” at the Ruhrtriennale in Essen, Germany.Katrin Ribbe/Ruhrtriennale 2023Like “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Vienne’s latest creation is a nocturnal piece. In the vast, often fog-shrouded confines of the Salzlager, she unspools a simple yet enigmatic tale about two estranged siblings (Adèle Haenel and Theo Livesey), who reunite at a party and rekindle their relationship, sifting through a painful family history. A third character (Katia Petrowick), who emerges during their long night of the soul, might be a kindred spirit who follows them from the party into the woods. Or perhaps she is a composite of figures from the siblings’ past, or of unconscious wishes.This is a demanding and elliptical production, in which much is implied, but little is ever settled. Vienne and her fellow artists achieve uncanny and cathartic effects through pared-down dialogue, controlled slow-motion choreography and dazzling laser stage lighting (by Yves Godin) that suggests both being at a club and inside a video game. Immersed in the swirl of fog, lasers and a synthesizer score by Caterina Barbieri, the audience seems bathed in postindustrial electricity.With its disquieting blend of surreal and blandly quotidian elements, “Extra Life” can be an exasperating puzzle. It’s best to just surrender to its visual and sonic rhythms over the course of its unhurried 140 minutes. Over the coming months, the production will travel to Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and France.This is Frey’s last summer leading the Ruhrtriennale. Her time at the festival has widely been judged a success, especially next to the troubled reign of her predecessor, Stefanie Carp. But the creators Frey championed were often extreme, or obscure.From next year, the Belgian director Ivo van Hove will be in charge. Like his predecessors, he is sure to put his stamp on the festival, and there is no doubting that van Hove has a questing and disruptive bent. The Ruhrtriennale will give him his biggest canvas yet. I’m curious to see how he chooses to fill the Ruhr region’s majestic cathedrals of industry.RuhrtriennaleThrough Sept. 23 at various venues in northwestern Germany; ruhrtrienniale.de. More

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      The Moment of Death, Live Onstage

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      The Swiss provocateur Milo Rau’s latest work explores the ethics of voluntary euthanasia with real footage of an assisted suicide.DOUAI, France — A serene woman greets the audience at “Grief & Beauty,” the Swiss theater director Milo Rau’s latest production. As spectators take their seats, she appears on a video screen above the stage, silent, in a red sweater and black-rimmed glasses. Then, minutes into the show, we learn that Johanna, as she is identified, died on Aug. 28 — by choice and in Belgium, where euthanasia is legal.Real footage of Johanna’s death is the macabre centerpiece of “Grief & Beauty,” the second installment in Rau’s “Trilogy of Private Life.” The first, “Familie,” recreated a family’s real-life collective suicide in eerie detail. Like “Familie,” “Grief & Beauty” had its premiere in Ghent, Belgium, where Rau is the artistic director of the NTGent theater. This month, the show traveled to Le Tandem, a playhouse in the northern French city of Douai. Further tour dates are scheduled in France and the Netherlands.“Grief & Beauty” flirts even more closely with the choice to die than “Familie.” Instead of turning the subject matter into a drama, Rau actually shows us the moment a lethal injection killed Johanna. Yet while she is the heart of “Grief & Beauty,” the production barely scratches the surface of her life.Voluntary euthanasia, which is legal in only a handful of countries, has become a subject of fascination for Europe’s experimental theatermakers in recent years. In 2018, the Belgian choreographer Alain Platel also filmed a dying woman and played the footage throughout his 100-minute work “Requiem for L.” The next year, Marcos Ariel Hourmann, a doctor convicted of practicing euthanasia in Spain, where it is illegal, put on an interactive show in which he asked the audience members to judge him.“Grief & Beauty,” like Platel’s production, was created with the consent of everyone involved, and Rau details in an interview in the program the research that went into the production. His team, including the four actors onstage, met with health care workers and bereaved relatives, as well as patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Some of them also visited Johanna last summer, we are told during the show.Princess Isatu Hassan Bangura, who was born in Sierra Leone, in “Grief & Beauty.”Michiel DevijverYet for most of it, Johanna takes a back seat to the actors’ stories. Instead of zeroing in on euthanasia, Rau assembled a motley cast of professionals and amateurs who have all experienced grief, albeit in different ways. Arne de Tremerie talks eloquently about his mother’s multiple sclerosis; Staf Smans, the oldest cast member, recounts the deaths of his sister, mother and daughter in quick succession. Princess Isatu Hassan Bangura, who was born in Sierra Leone, touches on another kind of pain —— that of being exiled and losing, as she puts it, her “African side.”Each of these performers speaks either directly to the auditorium or to a camera positioned to the right of the stage, which relays their monologues on the screen above. In keeping with Rau’s habit of mixing reality with semi-fictional scenes, they then perform vignettes set in an apartment. A kitchen, a bedroom and a bathroom are visible; at one point, an actor mentions that several items in the décor, including a handmade quilt, belonged to Johanna.Here and there, the script returns to her life. We learn that she witnessed the bombing of Rotterdam in the Netherlands during World War II, when she was 4; that she loved classical music; and that she once performed as a singer at NTGent. Out of the hours members of Rau’s team spent with her, it’s not much. Instead, she hovers mostly silently above “Grief & Beauty,” her eyes and expression alive and sympathetic.Before her death is shown, Johanna speaks briefly. “I always said I would go with a smile,” she says, before adding: “I have a lot of sleep to catch up on.” The injection follows.We watch as one of her eyes closes involuntarily, and her breathing becomes halted. In Douai, some around me cried openly. (Euthanasia is illegal in France, but according to an April survey by IFOP, one of the country’s leading polling organizations, 93 percent of French people support it in cases of terminal illness.)“Dido’s Lament” from Henry Purcell’s opera “Dido and Aeneas,” which opens “Grief & Beauty,” returns at this moment, along with more personal anecdotes from the cast. Yet no matter how hard Rau tries to interweave their stories with Johanna’s, her presence is overpowering. She belonged in a production of her own.Death has also long haunted the repertoire of the French director and choreographer Gisèle Vienne. This fall, audiences in France have a chance to revisit those works: The Festival d’Automne à Paris, a prestigious annual event taking place across numerous venues in the French capital, is devoting a retrospective to Vienne. Her latest production, “The Pond,” was presented at the Théâtre Paris-Villette in September, and revivals of several older works are scheduled before the end of the year.“Kindertotenlieder,” created by the French director and choreographer Gisèle Vienne. Mathilde Darel“Kindertotenlieder,” created in 2007, returned this month for four performances at the Centre Pompidou with a new cast — that is, a new human cast, since the stage is mostly populated with highly realistic dolls and robots. When “Kindertotenlieder” starts, it’s difficult to gauge just how many of the hunched-over teenagers in the darkened, snow-covered space are real.When the five actors do move and speak, “Kindertotenlieder” is no less disquieting. Although there is no linear story, the murder of a teenager by one of his peers gives a starting point. When the murdered boy’s ghost, the killer and others talk, it’s often to themselves, and the American writer Dennis Cooper’s text for the production is as chilling as it is over-the-top. (Sample line: “When I grow up, I want to behead your wife and kids.”)While the play’s title, which means “Songs on the Death of Children,” is borrowed from a song cycle by Gustav Mahler, the live music — introduced as a “memorial concert” for the dead boy — is by the duo KTL. To their moody, emo-adjacent songs, slow, violent interactions play out: A doll is strangled; two men kiss before one shoves the other, viciously.In “Kindertotenlieder,” as in “Grief & Beauty,” death is at the fingertips of the living. Neither production is for the faint of heart, but compared with the relentless angst of Vienne’s teenagers, there is relief in watching Johanna say her peaceful goodbye in “Grief & Beauty.” From time to time, reality still manages to be more soothing than fiction. More

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      In This Trippy Family Drama, Trauma Runs Deep

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      After two canceled Paris runs, a highly awaited production of Robert Walser’s “The Pond,” starring Adèle Haenel, finally made it to the stage in Switzerland.LAUSANNE, Switzerland — There is a feeling that streamed theater can’t quite replicate. It’s the sense of being immersed in a performance, to the point that you hang on to every sentence, every sound, every gesture. Distractions fade away. All that matters, briefly, is the actors’ next move.In “The Pond” (“L’Étang”), a new production by the French director and choreographer Gisèle Vienne, no move is inconsequential. Its two leads, Adèle Haenel and Ruth Vega Fernandez, aren’t just in the room with the audience: for much of this trippy exploration of family taboos, it feels as if you’re breathing with them.After six months of uncertainty because of the pandemic and two canceled Paris runs, “The Pond” finally made it to the stage earlier this month — in the Swiss city of Lausanne. While theater performances in France and Britain won’t resume until later in May, playhouses in Switzerland cautiously reopened on April 19.Restrictions still apply: No more than 50 audience members are allowed per show. Still, it’s a start. At the Vidy theater in Lausanne, where “The Pond” ran through Wednesday, tickets for the season sold out within hours. (The production is set to tour Europe this year, with a presentation at the Holland Festival, in Amsterdam, in June.)In a way, a world premiere in Switzerland was fitting for “The Pond.” Vienne’s show is based on a short play by the Swiss writer Robert Walser, about a child who pretends to drown in order to test his mother’s love.Walser wrote “The Pond” as a gift to his sister, Fanny, and it was arguably never intended for the stage. (For starters, it is only 20 pages long.) That suits Vienne, a trained puppeteer whose work is rarely driven by text. Her adaptation is in no way literal, yet it takes a magnifying glass to the unsettling allusions in Walser’s play — to child abuse, incest and family trauma.Fernandez stands in for the adults in “The Pond.” Between them, Fernandez and Haenel play 10 different characters.Estelle HananiaIt is also a feat of polyphony, which builds on Vienne’s interest in altering and distorting the voice. (In 2015, she took a close look at ventriloquy in “The Ventriloquists’ Convention.”) Between them, Haenel and Fernandez play 10 characters: Haenel embodies Fritz, the central character who fakes suicide, as well as his siblings and young friends, while Fernandez stands for the adults in the story.Theirs are virtuosic performances, built out of seemingly disparate elements. When the lights first go up on a large white box, designed by Vienne, the audience is greeted by seven puppets — life-size teenage girls, some of them huddled on and around a bed, with clothes strewn on the floor. One by one, to deafening club music, they are carried offstage by a technician.Haenel and Fernandez enter as the last doll disappears, and eerily, the actors appear to have taken their cues from the inanimate characters. Every step they take is in extreme slow motion, yet it doesn’t look robotic: Haenel, in baggy pants, an oversize sweater and a cap, has the slight hunch of an angsty teenager, while Fernandez exaggeratedly sways her hips.When they start speaking, on the other hand, Walser’s lines come fast. The narrative arc is clear, from Fritz’s squabbles with his sister to his attempts to reconnect with his mother, yet what happens visually has relatively little to do with it. When Fritz visits a sick friend, we see Haenel lying on the ground, laughing and emptying a bag of candy over her head.The gap between story and movement lends the proceedings an air of unreality, as does the accompanying soundscape. Haenel and Fernandez both wear body mics, and every sigh and groan is amplified to go with an ominous electronic score, composed by Stephen F. O’Malley and François J. Bonnet.Haenel, who rose to fame as a film actress and has become a prominent voice of the #MeToo movement in France, makes astounding use of this setup. Her voice rises and drops on a dime as she switches back and forth between the children in the story, yet she never plays the characters in a conventionally realistic manner.Some scenes feature life-size puppets. Estelle HananiaInstead, even in stillness, emotions wash over her body with affecting clarity. Time and again, in her performance, pain morphs into pleasure, before regressing back to pain. Between scenes, she climbs slowly onto the bed previously occupied by the inanimate teenage girls, with a hint of erotic charge — also present between Fritz and his sister Klara. At times, it’s impossible to tell whether Haenel is assuming their roles, or making the story up in a dreamlike state.Opposite her, Fernandez plays Fritz’s parents — especially his mother — with hardened distance. While she and Haenel rarely look at each other, there is an unspoken power struggle between them: at one point, Haenel stands over Fernandez as she crumbles to the floor, and unhurriedly spits at her feet.It’s a transfixing performance, which brings to the surface emotions that are often suppressed in dysfunctional family settings. Haenel and Fernandez are by turns sensual and monstrous; Fritz is thrilled to have earned proof of his family’s love after his carefully staged stunt by the pond, while his mother resolves to make amends without quite knowing how.“Now all is good,” Fernandez says. “I will make it up to you.” Briefly, they walk toward each other. A resolution is in sight, until Haenel stops and bends over in pain, gulping for air. While Walser suggests a form of reconciliation, in Vienne’s world, there is no such thing as a happy family ending. Trauma runs too deep.It may sound too bleak for audiences after a tough year, yet as I emerged from the Vidy theater, my mind was as stimulated as it’s been in months. For 90 minutes, artists claimed my full attention, and repaid it in spades. I’m ready for more. More