While this performance shares three dancers with Crowd, Sophie  Demeyer, Katia Petrowick and Theo Livesey, it functions as a kind of  negative to it, characterised by the lack of crowd and vital need of one. All Gisèle Vienne’s work is political, through its artistic and  philosophical themes, formal research, and its questioning of culturally constructed perception and its possible shifts. It is a direct and  visceral response to an immediate and profound pain, that of bodies frustrated and constrained by politics and its systems of domination. Staging absent bodies, the performance reflects on the question of the sharing of emotions socially, as formulated by the professor and doctor in psychology Bernard Rimé, the need for the crowd and the dangers of isolation and desocialisation. Providing the opportunity to meet others and reoccupy public space or alternative venues such as the Station in Paris, an essential and creative space, is one of the promises of this performance.

(source: programme of the CN D)

Gisèle  Vienne is a Franco-Austrian artist, choreographer, and theatre and film  director. From an early age, she was trained in visual arts by Dorothéa  Vienne-Pollak, and later studied dance, music, philosophy, and  puppeteering.

Over the past twenty years, her work has toured in Europe, Asia, and America, among others the productions 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.

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. In 2024/2025 she presents two new exhibitions  for the Contemporary Art Center Haus am Waldsee and the Georg Kolbe  Museum inaugurated as part of Berlin Art Week 2024. 

She published her photography in the books JERK/Through Their Tears with Jonathan Capdevielle, Dennis Cooper,and Peter Rehberg (Paris: Dis Voir, 2011) and 40 PORTRAITS (2003–2008), in collaboration with Dennis Cooper and Pierre Dourthe (Paris: Éditions P.O.L., 2012). A  new book of photographs, designed in collaboration with Estelle Hanania  and Elsa Dorlin, is published by Spector Books in November 24. Her work has led to various publications and the original music of her shows to several albums.  

Source and more information: https://www.g-v.fr/en/gisele-vienne/

Since 2001, the National Center for Dance (CND) has been making recordings of its shows and educational programming and has created resources from these filmed performances (interviews, danced conferences, meetings with artists, demonstrations, major lessons, symposia specialized, thematic arrangements, etc.).