Festival de la cité de Lausanne - du 4 au 9 juillet 2017 - 46ème édition

Emilie Rousset (FR)

Performance / Theatre

 Les spécialistes is an invitation to a fun and breezy walk in a playground. The interactive contraption is created for passageways and is specific to the city hosting the piece. Four actors recreate talks given by experts in any subject. The spectators/visitors stroll from one listening station to the next, settling in comfortably as they immerse themselves in the audio clips for about ten to fifteen minutes. As they move around and ponder, thoughts begin to take shape and the guiding thread slowly unravels. The idea here is to “create tiny bubbles in a pedestrian area.”

Like simultaneous interpretation, the performers do live re-enactments of conversations between Emilie Rousset and many different specialists. “Their passion is brought to life by the actors,” notes the French stage director. It is a powerful artistic process that emphasizes intellectual diversity, as well as diversity in vocabulary and methodology. Once the interviews are recorded, Emilie Rousset and her team create a montage, a juxtaposition of knowledge that results in a piece specific to this performance/installation. The author aims to preserve the flow of speech and the singularity of each specialist in the actors’ scripts.

The theme that usually emerges is city and context-dependent. In Lausanne, the discourse will focus on the notion of public spaces. The actors narrate the rhetoric of several individuals on the subject, namely an urban philosopher, an expert on new technology, a collective reflecting on humanist architecture, and two researchers working on the consequences of austerity measures on urban architecture.

This immersive performance was first presented in the Grand Palais de Paris to complement the Momenta 2014 exhibit by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. Subsequently, the piece was recreated in many other locations such as La Villette, The Val-de-Marne Contemporary Art Museum, Centre Pompidou-Metz, Théâtre de Lorient, Le Quai in Angers, and le POC (Pôle culturel) in Alfortville. 

Emilie Rousset’s strength lies in her ability to forge strong ties and engage a polysemous dialogue between her creation and the host event or space, be it a festival, a museum or a performing arts theater.

 Let yourself be carried along in this stroll that awakens the senses with thought.

Note: This performance / installation is in French.

Galerie

• Emilie Rousset - Morgane Raposo

• Emilie Rousset - Eddie Taz

• Emilie Rousset - Eddie Taz