Éric Vigner
Since 1990, Éric Vigner has been developing a theatre practice that relies heavily on the choice of authors, classic or contemporary, whom he wants to have heard, and on the search for aesthetic forms capable of bringing forth a stage design of today, linked to the venues he invests and the general movement of the arts. It is unquestionably to his double training – plastic arts studies and the Conservatoire national supérieur d'Art dramatique – that he owes the specific orientation of his approach. If Dubillard and Duras were his travel companions for years, he also was interested in Hugo, Corneille and Shakespeare, without counting Molière whom he presented in Seoul in 2004, Beaumarchais in Tirana in 2007 and Koltès whom he staged in Atlanta in 2008, demonstrating his interest in international projects that allowed him to encounter other languages, other practices, other publics and other interpreters. These encounters aroused his desire to imagine, in Lorient, whose Centre dramatique national he has been running since 1996, an “Académie”, a transmission, research and production space, in which he has the actors from many different horizons work together. An experimental project and theatre laboratory, this adventure brought together actors from Morocco, South Korea, Romania, Germany, Belgium, Mali and Israel, bringing with them their history and their culture. This three-year project made it possible to compare singularly different writings: La Place royale by Corneille, Guantanamo by Frank Smith and today The Faculty, a play written for them by Christophe Honoré, which will mark Éric Vigner's third participation in the Festival d'Avignon, after Brancusi against the United States in 1996 and Summer Rain in Hiroshima in 2006.
JFP, April, 2012