The team behind Radio Live La Relève. Photo by Yohanne Lamoulere
(PRINCETON, NJ) -- Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts, Department of French and Italian, and L'Avant-Scène will present the 13th edition of Seuls en Scène French Theater Festival, which will take place from September 12-22, 2024 at venues across the University's campus. Most performances and talks will be in French, some with English supertitles. All events are free and open to the public, however tickets are required for performances.
Seuls en Scène ushers in the 24th season of L’Avant-Scène, a French theater troupe of Princeton students. It also celebrates professional theatrical achievements from the past year: many of the invited artists to Seuls en Scène are prominent contributors to contemporary theater in France. The festival is organized by Florent Masse, Professor of the Practice in the Department of French and Italian and artistic director of L’Avant-Scène, and presented in collaboration with the 53rd Edition of Festival d’Automne in Paris and new partner Festival d'Avignon.
“I couldn’t be more thrilled to continue the festival in-person after a great anniversary edition in 2022 and last year's edition,” said Masse. “This year we’ll usher into a new era of collaboration with Festival d'Avignon, bringing to Princeton recent productions of the festival. Since its inception in 2012, Seuls en Scène has been a joyful ride every year. I’m delighted by the festival’s trajectory from its humble beginnings to the ways it’s grown over the years, uplifting students and local audiences.”
Highlighting Seuls en Scène’s new partnership with Festival d’Avignon, a conversation with former Festival d’Avignon Director Hortense Archambault and current Director Tiago Rodrigues kicks off the festival. Founded in 1947 by Jean Vilar, the Festival d’Avignon is among the world's most important contemporary performing arts events. Every year in July, Avignon becomes a city-theater, transforming its architectural heritage into various performance venues, welcoming audiences in the tens of thousands. The conversation, in French, is on September 12 at 4:30pm in East Pyne, Room 010.
Nasi Voutsas (left) and Bertrand Lesca in L’Addition by Tim Etchells.
Following on September 13 and 14 at 8:00pm in the Wallace Theater at the Lewis Arts complex is L’Addition by Tim Etchells. This small-scale touring show from the 2023 Festival d’Avignon focuses on a customer who orders a drink and things go awry. With this scene tirelessly repeated by performers Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas, the bill turns out to be steep indeed. Is the audience witnessing a nightmare or a comedy? This show will be performed in French with English supertitles in the Wallace Theater.
On September 14 at 11:00am Seuls en Scène celebrates the book launch of Les paradoxes du comédien by Laurence Marie, who has interviewed many past guest artists of the festival for her book project. Marie moderates a discussion with the performers of the festival’s first weekend and considers how Diderot’s Parodox of the Actor resonates in their craft today. This event, presented in French, will be held in the Julis Romo Rabinowitz Building, Room 399.
Tiago Rodrigues’ Chœur des amants is a lyric narrative of two lovers confronted with a life and death situation in which oxygen becomes scarce. At performances on September 14 and 15 at 5:00pm in the Hearst Dance Theater at Lewis Arts complex, the two actors/lovers give us, simultaneously, slightly diverging versions of the same story, celebrating love when everything else is put into question, and when we don’t know how to come to terms with normality. The show will be performed in French.
Prior to the second performance of Chœur des amants at 3:00pm on September 15 in the Rocky/Mathey Theater (Madison Hall 201), Tiago Rodrigues, current director of Festival d’Avignon, and French-Senegalese actor Adama Diop invite you into their laboratory and discuss their upcoming new creation for Festival d’Avignon 2025, an exclusive conversation for Seuls en Scène 2024 audiences. The conversation will be presented in French.
On September 18 at 8:00pm in Wallace Theater, French-Senegalese actor Adama Diop makes his Seuls en Scène debut, accompanied by musicians, to present a reading-performance in French of Aimé Césaire’s masterpiece Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. This groundbreaking work, mixing poetry and prose, and published in 1939, revolutionized French Caribbean literature by reflecting on the identity of Black Africans in colonial settings and inventing a new literary style.
In the Class of 1970 Theater at Princeton’s Whitman College, the festival will present Nil Bosca’s Euphrate, a hit of the 2023 Avignon Fringe Festival. Daughter of a Turkish father and a Norman mother, Euphrate is a high school student in her final year who is struggling with the education system. In addition to her rather mediocre grades, she must soon also choose a career path: a real headache. Euphrate is performed in French with English supertitles on September 20 at 6:00pm and September 21 at 5:00pm.
The uplifting show Radio Live returns to Seuls en Scène for the third time (after appearing in 2019 and 2022) with its new series, La relève, featuring a portrait of Sumeet Samos, a young activist hailing from New Delhi, India. In a continuation of the Radio Live series, Aurélie Charon and Amélie Bonnin join forces with cinematographer Mila Turajlić to initiate a new cycle in this unprecedented collective and international project which engages young people from all over the world in a long-term dialogue. Performed in English, this edition of Radio Live will be presented September 20 and 21 at 8:00pm in the Wallace Theater.
Stanislas Nordey (left) and Audrey Bonnet in Clôture de l’amour by Pascal Rambert. Photo by Marc Domage.
The festival closes on September 22 at 5:00pm with a performance of Pascal Rambert’s play written for the 2011 Festival d’Avignon, Clôture de l’amour in Chancellor Green Rotunda. Rambert’s masterwork first presented at the festival in 2016 will feature its original cast: Audrey Bonnet and Stanislas Nordey as a couple struggling through a painful break-up. The play was awarded the 2012 Prix de la Meilleure création d’une pièce en langue française (Best French Language Play) by the Syndicat de la Critique and the Grand Prix de littérature dramatique by the Centre national du théâtre.
Tickets are free and required for all of the above performances and available through University Ticketing. Conversation events are also free but do not require tickets.
All festival events are held in accessible venues. Click here to learn more about accessibility at the Lewis Center. Guests in need of other access accommodations are asked to contact the Lewis Center at [email protected] at least one week prior to the event date.
In addition to the new partnership with the Festival d’Avignon, Seuls en Scène continues its partnership with Festival d’Automne in Paris. Since 1972, the Festival d’Automne à Paris has been assisting artists internationally by producing and presenting their work in contemporary theatre, music, dance, visual arts and cinema at cultural venues throughout Paris.
L’Avant-Scène anticipates a full year of programming with Masse planning to direct Le Tartuffe by Molière with performances on October 31 through November 2 in the Choi Glass Box Theater of Yeh College, and Bérénice by Jean Racine on December 6 and 7 in the Rocky/Mathey Theater.
Masse, who curates the Festival, was trained as an actor and director at Lille National Theater alongside his studies in American Literature and Civilization at the University of Lille. He later pursued his theater studies at Amherst College as a Levy-Despas Fellow and a teaching assistant in the Department of French. It is there that he originated L’Avant-Scène, a program that combines language and dramatic training. He has directed nearly 80 full-length productions of canonical and new works of French theater since arriving at Princeton in 2001 and has hosted several prominent theater artists. In 2017, he was named Chevalier of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture.
The festival is presented by the Lewis Center for the Arts, the Department of French and Italian, and L’Avant-Scène with additional support provided by Princeton University’s Humanities Council, Provost’s Office, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Study (PIIRS), Center for French and Francophone Studies, Departments of Comparative Literature, Art and Archaeology, African American Studies, Program in European Politics and Society, Center of Excellence, and Rockefeller College. International sponsors include Festival d’Avignon, Festival d’Automne in Paris, Cultural Services of the French Embassy – Villa Albertine, FACE Contemporary Theater, the Education Department of the French Embassy, and Institut français.
Visit the Department of French and Italian website to learn more about L’Avant-Scène.
The Lewis Center for the Arts presents more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events each year, most of them free.
