This Is How You Will Disappear

In This is how you will disappear, the French theatre-maker Gisèle Vienne appears to be bringing the work of David Lynch, Alain Robbe-Grillet or Lewis Carroll to the stage. She is working on the boundary between dream and reality, and between appearance and reality. Nothing is what it seems, and everything is bursting with symbolism.

The stage is transformed into a mystical forest of high trees, impenetrable wisps of mist amongst which fly birds of prey, and where three figures confront one another. They are three archetypes of the ideals of beauty found in pop culture: the tyrannical trainer represents discipline and authority, a young athlete represents physical beauty and the cool rock star to some extent already symbolises decline, as in the cases of Kurt Cobain and Goethe’s Werther.

Vienne examines aesthetics and beauty, but in so doing inevitably also finds chaos, disorder and the dark side of the wood. On the basis of Nietzsche’s philosophy, she moves back and forth between inspired Dionysian splendour and the order and perfection of Apollonian beauty.

Gisèle Vienne studied philosophy and later completed a course at the Ecole Supérieure Nationale des Arts de la Marionette. She works as a choreographer, director and artist. This is how you will disappear was a great success at the Avignon Festival and was also warmly received in the Netherlands.

Gisèle Vienne’s Jerk will be on at the Beursschouwburg on Tuesday 7 February. It is a fictional reconstruction of the crimes of an American serial killer. Vienne made it as puppet theatre so as to frame the horror in a performance which, although dark, is also poetical and humorous. Jerk is a synthesis of three previous productions Vienne did with the American author Dennis Cooper.