Gisèle Vienne

Crowd

• Click here to purchase tickets for Crowd by Gisèle Vienne on Saturday 17 September, at 8.30 pm
• Click here to purchase tickets for Crowd by Gisèle Vienne on Sunday 18 September, at 8.30 pm

Crowd is the representation of a party as a ritual, a collective practice and a symbol belonging to societies of all times. The party that literally takes place on the stage of the Teatro Argentina is a rave: through specific attitudes, gestures and movements, the moving bodies will evoke long-lost memories of bacchanals, tarantism and trance. A party usually represents an excess of life through the collective expenditure of energies, whereas here a slow-motion effect expands the perception of things.
How do individuals gather in a group? What flows from one singularity to the other? Which moods propagate? How is control enacted? And emulation?
Just like during a party, when we watch “stories” unfold before our eyes, similarly in Crowd narratives and movements combine and unravel, blending with time alterations that blur our vision.
Spectators are asked to adhere to the performance, experience it, and dwell on the rhythm vibration it produces. Despite having no text, Crowd is capable of assembling micro-stories layered as expressive elements – such as movement, light, and sound – in an evolving range of conflicting feelings of attachment and distance, of participation and discomfort. Whether it is domination or love, we are there alongside the 15 performers gathered on stage, catapulted into a painting that preserves the hallucinatory features, where something that deeply concerns us emerges.

Crowd is part of
PRISMA – Inventory of Shimmers
Gisèle Vienne in the city of Rome
6—18 September

Gisèle Vienne is a Franco-Austrian artist, choreographer and director. After graduating in Philosophy, she studied at the puppeteering Ecole Supérieure Nationale des Arts de la Marionnette. She works regularly with the writer Dennis Cooper, and with other artistic figures including the recently deceased Austrian composer of experimental electronic music, Peter Rehberg (aka Pita).
Over the past 20 years, her work has been touring in Europe and regularly performed in Asia and in America, among which, I Apologize (2004), Kindertotenlieder (2007), Jerk (2008), This is how you will disappear (2010), LAST SPRING: A Prequel (2011), The Ventriloquists Convention (2015) in collaboration with Puppentheater Halle and Crowd (2017) and L’Etang (The Pond) (2020). In 2020, she created with Etienne Bideau-Rey the fourth version of Showroomdummies at the Rohm Theater Kyoto, originally created in 2001 and in 2021 she directed the movie Jerk.
Gisèle Vienne has frequently been exhibiting her photographs in museums among which the New York Whitney Museum, the Centre Pompidou, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Buenos Aires and Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. She has published two books: JERK / Through Their Tears and 40 PORTRAITS 2003-2008 (2012). Her work has led to various publications and the original music of her shows to several albums.

conception, choreography and scenography Gisèle Vienne
assisted by Anja Röttgerkamp and Nuria Guiu Sagarra
lights Patrick Riou
dramaturgy Gisèle Vienne and Denis Cooper
music selections from Underground Resistance, KTL, Vapour Space, DJ Rolando, Drexciya, The Martian, Choice, Jeff Mills, Peter Rehberg, Manuel Göttsching, Sun Electric and Global Communication
edits, playlist selection Peter Rehberg
sound diffusion supervisor Stephen O’Malley
performers Lucas Bassereau, Philip Berlin, Marine Chesnais, Sylvain Decloitre, Sophie Demeyer, Vincent Dupuy, Rehin Hollant, Nach, Theo Livesey, Maya Masse, Katia Petrowick, Linn Ragnarsson, Jonathan Schatz, Tyra Wigg alternately with Morgane Bonis and Henrietta Wallberg
costumes Gisèle Vienne in collaboration with Camille Queval and the performers
sound engineer Adrien Biehler
technical manager Erik Houllier
stage manager Antoine Hordé and Philippe Deliens
light manager Arnaud Lavisse
special thanks Louise Bentkowski, Dominique Brun, Zac Farley, Uta Gebert, Etienne Hunsinger, Margret Sara Guðjónsdóttir, Isabelle Piechaczyk, Richard Pierre, Arco Renz, Jean-Paul Vienne and Dorothéa Vienne-Pollak

production & touring Alma Office: Anne-Lise Gobin, Camille Queval and Andrea Kerr
administration Cloé Haas and Giovanna Rua
producer DACM / Company Gisèle Vienne
co-producers Nanterre-Amandiers, centre dramatique national / Maillon, Théâtre de Strasbourg – Scène européenne / Wiener Festwochen / manège, scène nationale – reims / Théâtre national de Bretagne / Centre Dramatique National Orléans/Loiret/Centre / La Filature, Scène nationale – Mulhouse / BIT Teatergarasjen, Bergen
support CCN2 – Centre Chorégraphique national de Grenoble / CND Centre national de la danse
DACM / Compagnie Gisèle Vienne is supported by Ministère de la culture et de la communication – DRAC Grand Est, la Région Grand Est and Ville de Strasbourg
and by the Institut Français for international touring and by Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels
Gisèle Vienne is an associated artist at the CN D Centre national de la danse and at the Théâtre National de Bretagne. As from 2023 Gisèle Vienne will be associated artist at MC2 Grenoble.