Philippe Quesne

Born in 1970 in the region of Paris, Philippe Quesne was educated in fine arts at the École Estienne and then at the Arts décoratifs in Paris. He then worked as a director and stage designer for theatre, opera and contemporary art exhibitions for ten years. In 2003, he created the Vivarium Studio theatre company, bringing together a group of actors, artists and musicians and creating shows as both author and director in which the scenography is envisaged as an ecosystem into which he immerses his performers. His shows form a repertoire that has toured the world: “La Démangeaison des ailes” (2003), “Des expériences” (2004), “D’après nature” (2006), “L’Effet de Serge” (2007), “La Mélancolie des dragons” (2008), “Big Bang” (2010), “Swamp Club” (2013), etc. From 2014 to 2020, he was director at Nanterre-Amandiers – Centre dramatique national, where he created “Le Théâtre des négociations” (2015), a simulation of the climate summit with sociologist Bruno Latour and his team, “La Nuit des taupes / Welcome to Caveland” (2016), “Crash Park, la vie d’une île” (2018), and with Jean-Luc Godard’s collaborators he invented the “Parcours JLG Livre d’Image”. Since the beginning of 2021, after seven years as director of the cdn Nanterre-Amandiers, he has reactivated his independent company Vivarium Studio. In 2021, he created a stage version of Gustav Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth)” with Klangforum Wien at the Wiener Festwochen, followed by the science fiction piece “Cosmic Drama” for the repertoire of Theater Basel. In May 2022, he created a play without actors, “Fantasmagoria”.