Space as the First Gesture
The SCÉNO festival welcomes artists who invent forms, open up the stage, and, through their gestures, sketch out new perspectives. A set is never neutral: it already contains, in negative, a play yet to come. This is the vision carried by SCÉNO.
The festival invites scenographers who are also directors, visual artists, and choreographers. What do they have in common? The stage — which they constantly reinvent, each in their own way.
On the program: four performances, one installation, and a series of conversations conceived as dialogues to share their approaches. There will also “scenographic quarter-hours” proposed by ENSATT students, as well as post-show discussions. SCÉNO proposes to approach theatre from its very foundations: where everything begins.
In Das Was Ist (“What Is”), Ulla von Brandenburg makes the curtain—an emblematic object of the theatre—the core of her installation. Pierced by a circular opening, each curtain becomes both a passage and a viewpoint.
By moving through these openings, the audience is immersed in successive fields of vivid color. The reverse side of the set reveals another kind of beauty: that of the traces left by paint rollers. The work thus becomes a promise of theatre, offering in a single gesture both access to fiction and the exposure of its making.
“I use fabrics to create spaces in which one can imagine being elsewhere, so to speak falling into other worlds. In a space where curtains are suspended, the separation between inside and outside, or between different worlds, becomes blurred. And this blurring leads one to question where one is.”
— Ulla von Brandenburg
In partnership with Abattoirs, Musée FRAC Occitanie Toulouse.