In English s'il vous plait

The Confessions

In his previous shows — Love, Faith, Hope and Charity, as well as A Death in the Family, all programmed at the Ateliers Berthier — Alexander Zeldin told the story of our world by weaving together fragments of individual destinies. In The Confessions, he chose to depict an entire life, from birth to death. His play is drawn from the story of his mother: her origins in Australia in 1943, her childhood in a modest background, her quest for education, her new start in life as a divorced woman in exile in London, and the creation of a family. Alice’s journey goes through the great social changes of the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of 21st century. Her love life is the common thread of a story of both personal and collective emancipation. With brief, concrete scenes, through moments lifted from an almost eight-decade-long timespan, the actors sensitively evoke the story of her life.

ANGELA [a strange loop]

Susanne Kennedy is one of the most singular artists to have emerged on the European scene in the last few years. Inspired by the vulnerability that we have collectively been experiencing for the past three years, she created, with the multimedia artist Markus Self, a zoom on a woman’s life. What makes Angela Angela? We follow her through the most banal situations of human existence: waking up and sleeping, being born and giving birth, growing old and dying. Suddenly, she becomes sick. Do Angela’s mysterious symptoms transform her, or do they only change the way she sees herself? Angela is made up of millions of experiences, some of which have been told to her by others. Her perceptions create connections between social situations and digital worlds. What if she was nothing else but a "weird loop," an endless sequence that reactivated itself? At a time when bodies, machines, and technology connect to each other, what are existence, identity, and conscience becoming? Kennedy and Self turn ANGELA [a strange loop] into a case study on what it means to be human today.

Rohtko

In 2004, a painting by Mark Rothko was sold by a famous New York gallery to collectors, a couple, for more than eight million dollars. Seven years later, it was discovered that it was a fake — a "Rohtko." It was a Chinese artist, a math teacher from Queens, who had painted it in his garage, along with a few other paintings from Pollock and De Kooning. Starting from what became a huge counterfeit scandal, the Polish director Łukasz Twarkowski, a close collaborator of Krystian Lupa, created a total show that starts in the 1960s and goes through the last years of his life before arriving at the recent forms of digital art and crypto-art. His spectacular staging, created with Polish, Latvian and Chinese actors, brings visual arts and video onto the stage to question the merchandising of contemporary art and the myth of authenticity. What determines the value of a work of art: artists, gallery owners, influencers, experts, the art market? Through a powerful sensory journey, Rohtko shuffles the cards of the art world, and beyond it, of the things we are ready to give value to.