Gisèle Vienne

Gisèle Vienne (b. 1976, FR) is an artist, choreographer and director, she lives in Paris. Gisèle Vienne considers artistic creation a privileged place to explore the perception of reality, from social standards to the construction of our perceptions. Vienne’s creations are inhabited by anthropomorphic figures, mannequins, puppets, dolls, masks, dancers and actors embodying ambiguous characters. For her, art and theatre are spaces to dissect our understanding of the constructed reality, a pseudo-reality, a product of the shared creation of the representation of reality and to invent new hypotheses.

Dennis Cooper

Complex yet ruthlessly clear, Dennis Cooper’s (b. 1953, US) prose emotional and erotic lives of troubled teenagers. His characteristic ability to combine cruelty with tenderness, sadism with anxiety, has made him one of his generation’s essential voices. In addition to his film collaborations with Zac Farley, he is known for novels such as The George Miles Cycle (1989 -2000), The Sluts (2008) and The Marbled Swarm (2014). Since moving from Los Angeles to Paris in 2005, he has written nine theatre pieces for Gisèle Vienne and composed a series of innovative GIF novels.

Gisèle Vienne and Dennis Cooper, Last Spring : a Prequel, 2011
Installation
Conception and creation: Gisèle Vienne
Text and dramaturgy: Dennis Cooper
Voices: Jonathan Capdevielle
Sound: Peter Rehberg and Stephen O’Malley
Lumière: Patrick Riou and Samuel Dosière
Dolls creation and animations: Raphaël Rubbens, Dorothéa Vienne-Pollak, Nicolas Herlin (CLSFX) and Gisèle Vienne
Wall drawing design: Stephen O’Malley
Sound installation: Adrien Michel
Electronics and programming of the robot dolls: Nicolas Darrot
Technical direction: Richard Pierre
Text translation from American to French: Laurence Viallet
Production and distribution: Alma Office
Administration : Etienne Hunsinger and Giovanna Rua
Executive production: DACM Coproduction Le Quartz, Scène nationale de Brest, Le Parvis, Scène nationale de Tarbes – Pyrénées, Centre Pompidou-Paris
Supported by Centre d’art passerelle – Brest et de l’Espace HARD HAT – Genève and Conseil Général de l’Isère
The company DACM is supported by Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication – DRAC Alsace, Région Alsace and by the City of Strasbourg.
The company DACM is regularly supported by Institut Français / Ministère des Affaires étrangères for its international touring.
Gisèle Vienne is associated artist at Nanterre-Amandiers CDN  and Théâtre National de Bretagne / Rennes.
Courtesy of the artists and DACM

Last Spring: A Prequel is both an autonomous work and a prequel for the work in progress Last Spring, where the visitors are sent on the trail of the teenaged boy Charles, animated with the voice of Jonathan Capdevielle, who is engaged in a schizophrenic dialogue with his seemingly evil puppet. As visitors make their way through a hotel-like mental labyrinth, they learn about Charles’ story via their encounters with a complex puzzle of elements: a soundscape devised by Stephen O’Malley and Peter Rehberg; a text written by Dennis Cooper and delivered by an animated boy-like mannequin claiming to be Charles with his hand pupped.

On the walls of La Vieille Charité, Charles has obsessively drawn blueprints and maps that give visitors a clue to his actual location. The Last Spring works offer dizzying and disturbing mise-en-abymes that raise serious questions about 1 2 the trustworthiness of our perceptions and show us how events degrade when filtered through the subjectivity of language and other forms of representation.