Gisèle Vienne: 'Extra Life', Trafó Budapest, 8 May
- 25 Apr 2025 8:40 AM
In this hypnotically precise work, body, light and music not only tell an intimate story, but also provoke a new awareness of our viewing habits and systems of thought. 17 years after showing her seminal work Jerk, the renowned French artist returns to Budapest with her newest creation.
Two siblings who meet again at the end of a night of partying. A trauma that brought their close relationship in childhood to an abrupt end. A moment of realisation that might pave the way for a different life after twenty years. Gisèle Vienne fragments the moment of epiphany into its many facets: past, present, anticipated future, memory construction, and the imagination.
The world-famous French choreographer and director bravely confronts the denial arising from suppressed trauma and explores its painful consequences with sensitive openness.
EXTRA LIFE is the promise of a new life in which not only speaking out and sharing, but also processing and healing becomes possible. It raises questions of particular relevance in the context of current societal discourse in Hungary, where child protection is highly instrumentalized politically.
Gisèle Vienne’s reflection on perceptual hierarchies takes the form of a heterogeneous collage, created in collaboration with the performers. Adèle Haenel started her career as a cinema actress, among others working with filmmakers such as the Dardenne brothers and Céline Sciamma.
Katia Petrowick and Theo Livesey both come from a dance background and have been working with many established directors and choreographers before joining the company of Gisèle Vienne.
The sensuous yet oppressive dramaturgy is underscored by the music of synthesiser composer Caterina Barbieri, sound design by Adrien Michel and the immersive laser-light stage architecture by Yves Godin.
Over the past twenty years, Gisèle Vienne’s work has toured in Europe, Asia, and America, among others the productions and films Showroomdummies #1, #2, #3, #4 (2001 –2020), 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, Crowd (2017), L’Étang (2021), and EXTRA LIFE (2023). In 2021, she directed the film Jerk and in 2024 Kerstin Kraus.
Vienne has frequently exhibited her photographs and installations in museums, among them the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva and Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris.
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