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Archives of Feelings

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Archives of Feelings

Performing Arts Season 2026/2027

Archives of Feelings – Ein menschenleerer Raum in türkis-blauem Licht, festlich gedeckte Tische mit Blumen, im Hintergrund ein Luftballon.

Archives of Feelings – Ein menschenleerer Raum in türkis-blauem Licht, festlich gedeckte Tische mit Blumen, im Hintergrund ein Luftballon.

© Jean-Louis Fernandez

Eight people reunite after a wedding celebration: the piece unfolds as a gallery of portraits, revealing each character as a story within a story. In their first collaboration, Gisèle Vienne and Marie NDiaye make visible how power, violence and social expectations permeate bodies, language and relationships – quietly, precisely, relentlessly.

A celebration is over. Glasses lie empty, music has faded, fatigue settles over the room. Eight people remain – relatives, friends, chance acquaintances. What began as a wedding ritual transforms into an unstable social structure. Intimacy becomes a demand, care a question of power. It is in this moment that Gisèle Vienne’s new work begins.

A co-production with the Berliner Festspiele, the piece marks the first collaboration between the Franco-Austrian choreographer and director and the French writer Marie NDiaye, who has created the text for the performance. Both artists share a precise gaze on the subtle, often invisible forms of violence and control inscribed in language, gesture and relationships. 

Where NDiaye exposes psychic shifts, familial dependencies and social role models with literary precision, Vienne translates these tensions into bodies, time and choreographic density. Together, they shape a stage event that does not assert power but renders it palpable; and the music of Icelandic cellist and Oscar winner Hildur Guðnadóttir and Polina Zhukova, aka CCONTRARY, creates a sensual yet precise soundscape.

The work is structured like a portrait gallery. Each figure tells its own story – while also existing as part of a network defined by interdependencies. Present, memory and anticipated future overlay one another. Themes such as eco-anxiety, racism, sexuality, social origin, and the notion of “passing” – moving through the world as someone else – thread through the piece as latent forces. Identity appears not as a stable core, but as something continuously renegotiated under social pressure.

Presented as part of the Berliner Festspiele’s 2026/27 Performing Arts Season, devoted to myths and rituals, this stage work becomes itself a contemporary ritual: not a space for reconciliation, but a precise experiment. It lays bare how community forms, how power operates, and how fragile the promises of intimacy, protection and belonging have become.

Gisèle Vienne is one of the defining voices in international performance and theatre. Her works – including Jerk, Crowd, L’Etang and most recently Extra Life – are known for their experimental approach to time, uncanny precision, and depiction of latent violence beneath the surface of seemingly familiar situations. In collaboration with Marie NDiaye, whose writing is renowned for its radical ambivalence and unsparing analysis of familial and societal power structures, this research gains a new linguistic sharpness – and a compelling theatrical form.

Artistic Team

Gisèle Vienne – Conception, Choreography, Direction, Scenography

Marie NDiaye – Texts of the Inner Voices

Sophie Demeyer, Angélique Flaugère, Adèle Haenel, Julien Louisy, Theo Livesey, Audrey Merilus, Katia Petrowick, Julie Shanahan – Performers, Co-Creators, Other Texts

Hildur Guðnadóttir, Polina Zhukova aka CCONTRARY – Original Music 

Adrien Michel – Sound Design 

Nicolas Boudier, Gisèle Vienne – Lights 

Sara Ruiz Marmolejo – Technical Coordination, Stage Manager 

Adrien Michel, Géraldine Foucault Voglimacci – Sound Manager

Héloïse Evano – Light Manager 

Thibault Villard – Stage Manager

Paola Gilles, Raphaëlle Landré – Production, Touring 

Cloé Haas, Clémentine Papandrea – Administration

Produced by DACM / Compagnie Gisèle Vienne

Coproduced by Berliner Festspiele, Schauspielhaus Zürich, Les Nuits de Fourvière, Le Volcan – Scène nationale du Havre, MC2: Grenoble – Scène nationale, Wiener Festwochen, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Théâtre populaire romand La Chaux‑de‑Fonds – Centre neuchâtelois des arts vivants, MC93 – Maison de la Culture de Seine‑Saint‑Denis, Théâtre National de Bretagne – Centre Européen Théâtral et Chorégraphique, Maillon – Théâtre de Strasbourg – Scène européenne, Triennale Milano Teatro, TANDEM – Scène nationale Arras‑Douai, La Filature – Scène nationale de Mulhouse, International Summer Festival Kampnagel – Hamburg, BIT Teatergarasjen, DESINGEL – Antwerp, Manège – Scène nationale de Reims

With the support of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels

With the support and residency at Le Quai CDN – Angers

With the support of CENTQUATRE – Paris

Special thanks to the Théâtre national de Strasbourg

The Company Gisèle Vienne is supported by ministère de la Culture et de la Communication – DRAC Grand Est, the Région Grand Est and Ville de Strasbourg. The company is supported by the Institut Français for international touring.

Gisèle Vienne is associated artist at Théâtre National de Bretagne, at Chaillot – Théâtre national de la Danse, at MC2: Grenoble and at Le Volcan – Scène nationale du Havre.

The talk between Gisèle Vienne and Marie NDiaye takes place with the kind support of the Insitut français and the French Ministry of Culture.

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