Philippe Quesne

Insomniacs

Ready-made pianos & lonely ghosts, 2025

(based on Fantasmagoria, created in 2022)

With Les insomniaques, stage director and visual artist Philippe Quesne presents an installation based on his actorless play Fantasmagoria, premiered in 2022. In a dialogue with the legacy of E.G. Robertson's ghostly evenings of the late 18th century, Philippe Quesne staged a strange graveyard of mismatched mechanical pianos, a theater of objects populated by his spirits, spectral ancestors or clairvoyant poets, made up of volatile apparitions and magic lanterns. Musical creation byPierre Desprats brought this ballet of single machines to life, haunted by multiple sound evocations. Objects and instruments came to life to the rhythm of macabre dances, unstable images and incantatory fumes, equivocal traces of an afterlife. The piece unveiled a melancholy, theatrical metamonde of memory, a fairground ritual to exorcise fate. Whispered fragments of LauraVazquez's poems, Allan Kardec's questions to the spirits and Robertson's recommendations to the audience...

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Philippe Quesne

Born in 1970
Based in Paris

Trained in the plastic arts and scenography, Philippe Quesne began his career as a set designer for shows and exhibitions. In 2003, he founded Vivarium Studio, bringing together actors, visual artists, musicians and dancers to invent and stage his own pieces, focusing on visual and poetic dramaturgy and exploring human and non-human ecosystems. His plays and performances tour the world, and he regularly presents installations at biennials and festivals. Artistic Director of Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers from 2014 to 2020, then of La Ménagerie de Verre in Paris, since 2023.