In EXTRA LIFE, director and choreographer Gisèle Vienne composes a visual and emotional score where memory, imagination and physical presence converge. In this interview, with Vincent Théval for The Festival d’Automne à Paris, she reflects on how the piece extends the themes and explorations of her earlier work: how trauma is encoded – and denied – within patriarchal structures, and how art can help us unlearn these perceptual frameworks. Through sound, light, text and the body, EXTRA LIFE opens a space for re-sensitisation – a possible “extra life” where past, present and imagined futures can unfold at once.
EXTRA LIFE
Gisèle Vienne
28 – 29 juni 2025
Theater Bellevue - Grote zaal
Is EXTRA LIFE connected to your previous work?
All of my work is a long process of reflection that is built up from the gesture and works of their perceptual frameworks. Each new piece is a part of this process. And the previous ones do not remain fixed – they are very much alive, evolving, and are also actively part of this reflection. They are still touring for the most part, and we continue to work on them and think about them. EXTRA LIFE opens up the process of thought in space through experience, the body, speech, and everything that makes up artistic language. In this work, a brother and sister have managed to verbalize and articulate the traumatic experience they share, rape, as well as the disorienting perceptual encoding constructed by a patriarchal society that creates denial of the facts. Dramatically, and with subversive humor, the piece addresses the perceptual encoding that constructs denial and that allows its unveiling and understanding.
In Kindertotenlieder (shown at the Holland Festival in 2021, red.), for example, the construction of denial is constantly at work while rape and murder are clearly addressed there: the criminal attempts to brutally erase the revealed subject, while the others do not react. We then understand that it is not only a question of revealing the crimes, but of making them heard in a perceptual framework which is that of our society, which strives to silence them. And so, we understand the extremely concrete, physical, and political role of these theoretical questions linked to the perceptual frameworks, and the equally concrete structural role of the field of art. Once we have reached an understanding of the mechanics that create denial, we continue our work with EXTRA LIFE and address the possible reconstruction and the vital process of re-sensitization.
The title EXTRA LIFE calls for several interpretations: the idea of this possible reconstruction, of an “additional life”, but also of the experience of an unfolded moment. How would you elaborate on that?
The piece unfolds a particularly important moment for the brother and sister, at the end of a night, a few hours, when a new sensitive opening, common to the two characters, will allow them to encounter one another. Formally, the challenge is to imagine – as with Proust or Walser – how to unfold a moment. In EXTRA LIFE, formal dissonance and the effects of collage, through rhythmic and aesthetic qualities, make it possible to give an account of different perceptual strata and to invent a form that constitutes the present experience, where past, present, the anticipated future, construction of the memory, and imagination all come together. I also take my work on the collage of forms a step further, as it corresponds to an examination of the process of thought.
What were the main driving forces behind this creation?
I began to devote concrete thought to this project in 2018, based on the work of the philosopher Elsa Dorlin, in particular her essay Self-defense: A Philosophy of Violence. The driving force is the desire to work with Katia Petrowick, Theo Livesey, and Adèle Haenel, exceptional artists with whom I have been collaborating for quite a while now. What is exciting and very beautiful in the meeting between choreographer, director, and performers is the development of a capacity to be able to hear and speak to each other in a protean language. What I bring to the actors and dancers is a way of acting, a formal language that I have been developing for 23 years, whose development they contribute to by taking hold of it themselves. Then, in this language, the creation becomes a dialogue.
What forms do the various tools of creation take?
It is conceived of as a score for six, divided among the three interpreters, Caterina Barbieri as composer of the music, Adrien Michel responsible for sound design, and Yves Godin for lighting design. With Yves Godin, we work with specific lasers that allow for immersive sculptural work of an architectural nature. The light works on visible and invisible structures. For the music, for the first time I am collaborating with Caterina Barbieri, who plays the modular synthesizer, an instrument that goes along perfectly with lasers. In EXTRA LIFE, we are immersed in a very loving sound, as if that was the substance of this feeling. Caterina’s work is the color of pop music but is in an experimental register. Her compositions have a particular musicality which, for me, reflects the dramaturgy of love with a lot of sensuality, but also other emotions that music is able to take in in a very precise way. The text, with its different language registers, is created in collaboration with the interpreters and works on the ability of words to understand or disorient. In the process of our finding forms to affirm the intelligibility of the semiotics of gesture and non-verbal signs – against their depreciation or their forced silence, their relegation to the field of abstraction, of the mysterious, of the inaudible – forces a displacement of our habits perceptions and our structural way of hearing and seeing the world.
This interview was conducted for The Festival d’Automne à Paris.