Christophe Feutrier
In 1983, at the age of 19, Christophe Feutrier directed his first play, The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco, in Saint-Étienne. It was the beginning of an amazing professional itinerary, that unfolded, after his studies at the Geneva Conservatory, mostly outside France. First in Germany, where he was the dramaturgy assistant at the Kammerspiele in Munich for shows by Bob Wilson, Dieter Dorn and Thomas Langhoff, before going to Berlin and joining the Transformtheater of Henryk Baranowski. There he met artists who had come from Poland, Russia and the former Soviet Socialist Republics where he very quickly started to work. So he criss-crossed Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and many Russian cities including Moscow. Over 20 years of theatre and travel, including a stay at the Central Institute of the Theatre of China, he has produced over 30 shows and staged, in more than 10 languages, texts by Molière, Rûmi and Musset but also contemporary authors like Daniil Harms, Rémi De Vos, James Joyce, Bernard-Marie Koltès, Valère Novarina and more recently Oleg and Vladimir Presniakov. Director of the company Trajectoire-ADM (Amour du Monde), this director, author and translator is familiar with the work of Eugene Ionesco, based on which he has presented several stagings of texts, and directed Killing Game... With Frenzy for Two or More that he is present at the Festival d'Avignon for the first time alongside two great actors, Valérie Dréville, associate artist in 2008, and Didier Galas.
Eugene Ionesco (1909-1994) definitively moved to France in 1942, his mother's homeland, after many trips back and forth to Romania, his father's homeland and the cradle of his childhood. Making French his adopted language, he started his writing career in 1947 with The Bald Soprano. But he was not a success with the public until the 1960s, notably with Exit the King, published in 1962. That same year Frenzy for Two or More appeared, a play that, since its premiere, has had over 70 different stagings.
JFP, April 2010