Der Garten der Lüste

Philippe Quesne and his company are always concerned with the big picture. The pressing questions of our time have always been the subject of his artistic preoccupation. In his new production, celebrated in Avignon, Athens, Paris and at the Ruhrtriennale among other places – a large-scale retrospective of his more than 20 years of collaboration with the Vivarium Studio – the artist brings together the most important protagonists and motifs of his previous works and weaves them into a large theatrical panorama. This shows the development of human history, its flights of fancy and crashes, its dreams, the motor of human striving, its will to power and its failure. 

Quesne questions the rules of community building and how we deal with the environment. In a highly poetic, playful way, he allows scientific and aesthetic questions to intertwine. He sees his work as artistic research at the interface of art, philosophy, politics, ecology and childlike play. The theatre productions of the Vivarium Studio are humorous, lucid celebrations of the power of imagination as an answer to the fears of our time. The title of his anniversary play refers to the painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights” by Hieronymus Bosch, which was created more than 500 years ago, at the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. In dialogue with this key work of Western art history, Quesne questions the core of human self-understanding, man’s utopian visions, as well as his fractured relationship to the reality of the dystopian nightmares of the present.

In co-operation with Festival d’Avignon, Ruhrtriennale, Athens Epidaurus Festival, Berliner Festspiele, Théâtre du Nord, Centre Dramatique National Lille Tourcoing Hauts-de-France, Maison de la Culture d’Amiens, Pôle européen de création et de production, Les 2 Scènes, Scène nationale de Besançon, Centro dramatico nacional, MC93, Maison de la culture de Seine-Saint-Denis Bobigny, Le Maillon – Théâtre de Strasbourg, Kampnagel, Festival NEXT, Carré-Colonnes Bordeaux-Métropole, National Theater and Concert Hall Taipei und Tangente St. Pölten – Festival für Gegenwartskultur.