L’ÉTANG (The Pond), Gisèle Vienne (France) adapts Robert Walser’s bitter family drama. With Pina Bausch dancer Julie Shanahan, César winner Adèle Haenel, and doom metal band Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley

October 13–14 North American Premiere of the English-language version

An adaptation of a short work by Swiss writer Robert Walser, L’Étang throws light upon the intricate workings of a filial love story, where the ten roles are played by two actresses—Adèle Haenel and Julie Shanahan.

Known for tackling taboo issues in her work, director Gisèle Vienne has created a sensorial and emotional rollercoaster that examines the conventions of the family and blurs the boundaries between interiority and exteriority.

“A transfixing performance . . . my mind was as stimulated as it’s been in months.” Laura Cappelle, The New York Times, May 13, 2021

L’ÉTANG (The Pond)
Oct. 13 and 14, 2023

PS21: Performance Spaces for the 21st Century
Pavilion Theater
2980 NY-66, Chatham, NY
PS21chatham.org
(518) 392-6121

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Chatham, NY – PS21 Performance Spaces for the 21st Century, a vibrant center for contemporary performance in the Hudson Valley, presents the North American premiere of L’Étang, Gisèle Vienne‘s adaptation of Swiss author Robert Walser’s (1878-1956) play about a child who in despair tests his mother’s love by faking his down by drowning.

Two virtuoso actors, Adèle Haenel and Julie Shanahan, play 10 characters: Fritz, the son (Haenel),  and the child’s mother (Shanahan) as well lending their voices to the boy’s friends and siblings and the other adults. Thus creating a polyphonic monologue, an experience that moves between interiority and exteriority, Vienne orchestrates a complex sense of vocal dissociation that deconstructs the boundaries between fantasy and reality.

Reviewing the premiere in Lausanne in 2021, Laura Cappelle wrote in the New York Times that Vienne’s “adaptation is in no way literal, yet it takes a magnifying glass to the unsettling allusions in Walser’s play — to child abuse, incest and family trauma.”

Delayed by COVID, L’Etang has since played to sold-out audiences and rave reviews throughout Europe. Cappelle praised the ”transfixing  performance, which brings to the surface emotions that are often suppressed in dysfunctional family settings.. . . Every step they take is in extreme slow motion, yet it doesn’t look robotic: Haenel, in baggy pants, an oversize sweater and a cap, has the slight hunch of an angsty teenager. . . . every sigh and groan is amplified to go with an ominous electronic score, composed by doom metal band Sunn O))) frontman Stephen F. O’Malley and François J. Bonnet.”

L’Étang has affinities with two other works on the theme of mother-child relations on PS21’s horizon: two residencies will develop genre-defying musical and dramatic works based on familial relationships: MacArthur Award-winning flutist and inter-disciplinary artist Claire Chase performing Pauline OLIVEROS’s  Intensity 20.15, a work for flute, text, and Expanded Instrument System based on poems by Grace Chase, the artist‘s grandmother, and This is Mary Brown, the story of Winsome Brown’s charming, eccentric, troubled mother by Obie-award actor/director Winsome Brown. Brown will direct both works.

About the Artists:  

Gisèle Vienne is a Franco-Austrian artist, choreographer, and director. She earned a degree in  philosophy before enrolling in L’Ecole supérieure nationale des arts de la marionnette in Charleville-Mézières. Her shape-shifting œuvre involves dancers and actors, puppets and mannequins, masks and dolls, which produce a unique, uncanny sense of presence on stage.

Her work is regularly performed in Europe, Asia, and America (Crowd was at BAM last October), she has exhibited her photographs in art museums around the world, and has published two books: Jerk/Through Their Tears, in collaboration with Dennis Cooper, Peter Rehberg, and Jonathan Capdevielle (2011), and 40 Portraits 2003-2008, in collaboration with Dennis Cooper and Pierre Dourthe (2012). Works by Gisèle Vienne conjure up a universe of astonishingly beautiful, unfamiliar, strange and disconcerting images which serve as a microscope that captures with amazing clarity the collective emotions, fantasies and the forces that can push human behavior in one direction or another.

Adèle Haenel rose to early prominence in French films, after being cast in Les Diables at the age of eleven. She has won the César Award twice, in 2014 for her supporting role in Suzanne, and in 2015 for best actress in Love at First Fight and garnered notoriety for her role in Celine Sciamma’s lesbian love story Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019). Haenel made her theater debut in 2011 in Chekhov’s La Mouette, directed by Arthur Nauzyciel, and began working with Gisèle Vienne on this production of L’Etang n 2019. In 2022, she announced that she was stepping away from film acting to focus on theater work. She is a prominent face of the #MeToo movement in France.

A native of Australia, Julie Shanahan graduated from Adelaide’s Centre for Performing Arts in 1981. She joined Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal in 1988 and continues to dance in the company and serve as a rehearsal director. She also works as a restager of the Tanztheater repertoire for the Pina Bausch Foundation and recently restaged The Rite of Spring with dancers from across Africa, a collaboration between the Foundation and the École des Sables in Senegal. She has also made creations in recent years with Tom Etchells, Alan Lucien Øyen, and Rainer Behr. In 2021, she acted in Robert Wilson’s “I was sitting on my patio this guy appeared I thought I was hallucinating.”

Further Reading: 

• An Interview with Gisèle Vienne by Lindsey Winship, The Guardian, September 30, 2019
• In This Trippy Family Drama, Trauma Runs Deep, by Laura Cappelle, The New York Times, May 13, 2021
• The artist and choreographer dives deep into the rave and explores time, space, and the human condition, by William Van Meter, Artnet News, October 26, 2022

Related Events: 

• Wednesday, October 18,  6 pm, Albertine Books, 972 5th Avenue New York, NY

Monique Wittig’s French-American Legacy: Adèle Haenel, Sande Zeig, Annabel L. Kim & Noémie Solomon.
2023 marks the twentieth anniversary of the death of philosopher, writer, and lesbian feminist activist Monique Wittig, a key figure on the French literary scene in the 1960s. Monique Wittig co-founded the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (Women’s Liberation Movement) in 1970 and went on to become one of the most important feminist theorists, notably with the concept of the “Heterosexual Contract.” The evening, centered on three speakers of different nationalities and generations – filmmaker and former Wittig companion Sande Zeig, actress Adèle Haenel and academic Annabel Kim – was conceived in collaboration with choreographer Gisèle Vienne and moderated by academic Noémie Solomon.

About PS21/ Performance Spaces for the 21st Century

A vibrant center for contemporary performance in the Hudson Valley, PS21 “presents work that challenges and invites” (The New York Times): adventurous productions by leading and emerging American and international artists in music, dance, and theater, and visionaries creating entirely new genres. On our open-air Pavilion Theater stage, across our expansive, unspoiled grounds, and in the diverse surrounding communities, PS21 cultivates and presents productions that transcend aesthetic boundaries and revitalize existing artistic languages and grammars. Throughout the year, we host developmental residencies for dancers, musicians, actors, and creators of original, even unclassifiable new work. Rooted in community collaboration, PS21’s programming engages creatively with critical global and social issues. It is a mecca for innovative and original artistic voices, a destination for performance that can be experienced nowhere else in the region.

PS21’s Pavilion Theater is a green-energy marvel surrounded by 100 acres of unspoiled meadows, trails, and woodlands that are a haven to wildlife and visitors across the region. Integrated into our unspoiled campus, the theater embodies our commitments to the public: open, inviting, and optimized for their enjoyment and encouraging citizen expression and participation.

Explore the 2023 Season, HERE

The production/performances of L’ÉTANG received support from Villa Albertine.

Additionally, this engagement is supported by Risk 2 Reward Project, a program of the Lake Placid Center for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts with support from the Governor and New York State Legislature; and members of PS21 Producers Circle.

Tickets

Reserved Seating: $35
Student Tickets: $10
Professional tare: $25

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Performance Schedule:

Fri., Oct 13 at 7 :00 p.m.
Sat., Oct. 14 at 7:00 p.m.

High-resolution Press Images for L’ÉTANG can be found HERE. Tickets, HERE.

Visiting PS21 

Performance Spaces for the 21st Century, a state-of-the art venue on 100 acres of unspoiled meadows, trails, and woodlands in the heart of the Hudson Valley.

Accessibility

PS21’s theater is fully accessible and reservations for wheelchair spaces and aisle seating for those with mobility needs are available upon request. Ample parking is available, with spaces reserved for the disabled closest to the theater. Headsets may be requested at the box office prior to the show. Accessible restrooms are located in the theater lobby. For more information visit ps21chatham.org

Directions

PS21 is located at 2980 New York Route 66, in Chatham, New York. Driving time from Manhattan is approximately 2-2.5 hours. Free parking is available. If taking Amtrak, PS21 is 15 miles from the Hudson station, and 21 miles from the Albany/Rensselaer station, amtrak.com. Transportation to and from the train stations are available through Uber, and  local taxi companies Northern cab (518-828-4222), H Transport LLC, (518) 577-5388, htransportllc.com, and McCanns Taxi (518-610-0071).

MEDIA CONTACT: Tristan Geary
tristan@ps21chatham.org
(518) 392-6121
Lead Image: Julie Shanahan by Estelle Hanania

PS21 FALL SEASON

September 16 AN IMMIGRANT’S STORY

Wanjiru Kamuyu (Kenya/France), moving through a landscape of 35 empty black chairs, creates an intimate portrait of the migrant’s experience of being uprooted, exotified, and subjected to racism as she searches for a place in the world

September 30 NEVER TWENTY ONE by SmaÏl Kanouté & Compagnie Vivons! (Mali/France)

Never Twenty One infuses a variety of styles, from krump to wave, into a lament, tribute, and  protest of young Black men who lose their lives to gun violence before their 21st birthdays in New York, the favelas of Rio, and Soweto.

October 2–6 PS21 Creative Residency: Wanjiru Kamuyu

With Workshops in partnerships with Hudson’s Kite’s Nest, October 4

October 13–14 L’ÉTANG (THE POND)

Gisèle Vienne (France) adapts Robert Walser’s family drama. With Pina Bausch dancer Julie Shanahan, César winner Adèle Haenel, and doom metal band Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley

October 27 Miranda Cuckson (violin) and Blair McMillan (piano)  

Two House Blend favorites return in a program of works by Beethoven, Ross Lee Finney, Janacek, and Prokofiev.

October 17–25 Creative Residency: Sourcières

French choreographer Anne Collod explores the work of dance pioneers Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Trisha Brown to develop new relationships to our surroundings and identities. The new choreography for three performers will unfold in PS21’s unspoiled and landscaped spaces.

November 3–4 INTENSITY 20.15: GRACE CHASE and THIS IS MARY BROWN

The lives of two spirited women: MacArthur Award-winning flutist and inter-disciplinary artist Claire Chase performing Pauline OLIVEROS’s  Intensity 20.15, a work for flute, text, and Expanded Instrument System based on poems by Grace Chase, the artist‘s grandmother, and This is Mary Brown, a one-act, one-woman tour de force about Winsome Brown’s charming, eccentric, troubled mother by the Obie-award actor/director. Brown will direct both works and join Claire Chase in conversation after each performance.

December 11–17 Creative Residency with The Civilians

The celebrated U.S. investigative theater company developing Sex Variants 1941, a music-theater piece based on Dr. George Henry’s interviews and life histories of LBGTQIAP+ Americans in the 1930s. Written and directed by artistic director Steve Cosson, in collaboration with Colombian-American media artist Jessica Mitrani and music director Ada Westfall, a transwoman actor and musician.

December 21 Talea Ensemble Solstice Concert

Champions of visionary new works, Talea performs  Georg Friedrich Haas’s Solstices (2017) in complete darkness, evoking planetary movement.

View complete information about PS21’s current season

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