Bérangère Vantusso
After training as an actress at the CDN in Nancy, Bérangère Vantusso first encountered puppet theatre in 1998, while studying at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. She immediately identified that art as the crucial point of her research about incarnation and stage speech, and soon started working as a puppeteer with François Lazaro, then with Emilie Valantin. Determined to bring together puppets and contemporary texts, and to show that puppet theatre isn't only meant for children, she directed part of Heiner Müller's Germania Death in Berlin in 1999, and founded the company trois-six-trente. An associate artist and teacher in several national theatres, she works on her own projects (among which Jon Fosse's Kant in 2007; Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blind in 2008; Jon Fosse's Violet in 2012; Personne(s), which she co-wrote with Marguerite Bordat, in 2013; Eddy Pallaro's Le Rêve d'Anna (Anna's Dream) in 2014), while creating puppets for other directors. Working on the hyperrealism of those characters she always combines with actual actors, Bérangère Vantusso likes to play along the border between convention and illusion. She created Institute Benjamenta for the Festival d’Avignon in 2016, and has been the director of the Studio-Théâtre in Vitry-sur-Seine since 2017.
