Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, Department of French and Italian, and L’Avant-Scène will present the 14th edition of Seuls en Scène French Theater Festival, which will take place from September 12 to 21 at venues across the University’s campus. Most performances and talks will be in French, some with English supertitles or subtitles. All events are free and open to the public, however tickets are required for performances.
Seuls en Scène ushers in the 25th season of L’Avant-Scène, a French theater troupe of Princeton students. It also celebrates professional theatrical achievements from the past year: many of the invited artists to Seuls en Scène are prominent contributors to contemporary theater in France. The festival is organized by Florent Masse, Professor of the Practice in the Department of French and Italian and artistic director of L’Avant-Scène, and presented in collaboration with the Festival d’Avignon and the 54th Edition of Festival d’Automne in Paris.
“Bienvenue to a new exhilarating edition of Seuls en Scène’” said Masse “This year we’ll continue our new collaboration with Festival d’Avignon, bringing to Princeton recent productions of the festival. Since its inception in 2012, Seuls en Scène has been a joy ride every year. I am thrilled with the festival’s trajectory across 13 continuous years and look forward to new milestones ahead. More than ever we need the arts and international theater makers to uplift students and local audiences.”
Élios Noël (left) and Cédric Eeckhout in Une Ombre Vorace by Mariano Pensotti. Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage for Festival d’Avignon
This year’s festival kicks off on September 12 and 13 at 8 p.m. with Argentine playwright and director Mariano Pensotti’s Une Ombre Vorace, presented in partnership with the 2025 Festival d’Avignon. Pensotti, whose works often question the border between fiction and reality, uses the actions of filming a movie and climbing a mountain to compare two sides of human existence in Une Ombre Vorace. Jean Vidal, a mountain climber nearing the end of his career, decides to undertake the ascent of Annapurna in Nepal, where his father died some 30 years before; Vidal’s true story is adapted for the cinema. From there, Pensotti intertwines levels of fiction through the monologues of Vidal and Roux, the actor chosen to play Vidal’s role and who speaks of his own father. The show will be performed in French with English supertitles in the Wallace Theater.
The stars of Une Ombre Vorace, Élios Noël and Cédric Eeckhout, will join Florent Masse for a conversation about the state of the French contemporary stage on September 13 at 11 a.m. in East Pyne 010 prior to their evening performance. Noël and Eeckhout will share their experience working over the past decade with major figures in French and European theater including Caroline Guiela Nguyen, Thomas Ostermeier, and David Geselson. The conversation will be in French.
Back at Seuls en Scène after her virtual debut with a documentary film of her production Du sale! (2020) and _jeanne_dark_ (2021), writer/director Marion Siéfert brings another ferocious performance to this year’s festival. On September 13 and 14 at 5 p.m. in the Hearst Dance Theater, Siéfert crafts a wild investigation into the fantasies and norms of adolescence and womanhood, challenging collaborator Helena de Laurens to embody the tortures, triumphs and terrors of teenage girlhood. The show will be performed in French with English supertitles.
Helena de Laurens performs in Le Grand Sommeil by Marion Siéfert. Photo by Janina Arendt
In an exclusive conversation for Seuls en Scène audiences, Siéfert will discuss the trajectory of her career, current work, and future projects. The conversation, in French, will be on September 14 at 3 p.m. in Rocky/Mathey Theater, located in Rockefeller College on the Princeton University campus.
Following on September 17 at 8 p.m., celebrated French actor Micha Lescot comes to Seuls en Scène for the first time to present a musical reading performance of Franz Kafka’s masterpiece La Métamorphose. Accompanied by Olivier Marguerit and Jonathan Morali of the French folk band Syd Matters, Lescot lends his voice to deliver a highly personal interpretation of Kafka’s tale about a young salesman who wakes to find himself transformed into a giant insect—one that is never named but precisely described. Presented for one night only, the reading-performance will be in French with English supertitles in the Wallace Theater.
Adding film as a new highlight of the festival lineup, a screening of Les Amandiers by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi will be presented on September 18. Les Amandiers, an official selection of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, follows a moment in contemporary French theater history when the public theater, Nanterre Amandiers, housed a theater school. Filmmaker Bruni Tedeschi was among its first students, alongside other future prominent French screen and stage actors. The film revives the artistic dreams and fears of a generation of gifted drama students in the 1980s and features a cohort of A-list newcomers in French cinema including Nina Tereszkiewicz, Vassili Schneider, and Noham Edje. The screening, presented in collaboration with the Princeton Film Festival Society, begins at 7:30 p.m. in the James Stewart Film Theater at 185 Nassau Street. The film is presented in French with English subtitles. Following the screening, audiences can join a Q&A discussion with actor Micha Lescot, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the French Academy Awards for his role in Les Amandiers as Pierre Romans, the school’s director.
Stanislas Roquette is returning for this year’s festival. He performed two solo shows at the first edition of Seuls en Scène in 2012 and was associate artist of the festival in 2013. This year, Roquette presents an autobiographical tale full of impetus, humor and tenderness. In Insuline & Magnolia, he recounts the shock at age 15 of a medical diagnosis of insulin-dependent diabetes. His carefree childhood seemingly shattered, he soon meets free-spirited Fleur, a young woman who introduces him to the power of poetry and travel. Roquette’s show is the story of this childhood encounter, the friendship that followed, and the vital rebound that ensued. Insuline & Magnolia, recommended for ages 12 and up, will be presented on September 19 and 20 at 8 p.m. in Wallace Theater. The show is performed in French with English supertitles.
A scene from Insuline & Magnolia, written and performed by Stanislas Roquette. Photo by P. Gely
In East Pyne 010 on the Princeton campus, the festival will present Réparer la parole — Celebration of the 40th Anniversary of Actes Sud-Papiers. Celebrating forty years of theatrical editions in 2025, the Actes Sud-Papiers collection boasts more than 1,200 titles composed of plays, essays, and books on the performing arts. The celebration during the festival takes the form of a panel discussion on the theme Réparer la parole (Repair with Words) with renowned playwright-directors Wajdi Mouawad and Caroline Guiela Nguyen, both published at Actes Sud-Papiers. The conversation, moderated by French journalist Laure Adler, will be followed by a reading of excerpts from plays by Mouawad and Nguyen by French actor Jérémie Galiana including Tous des oiseaux, Lacrima and Racine carrée du verbe être. Nguyen will also offer a short preview reading of the future pièce commune of Festival d’Avignon Bérénice that she has been invited to create for 2027. The panel discussion and conversations, which will be in French, begin at 2 p.m. on September 20.
Following on September 20 at 5 p.m., author Nina Léger presents an imaginative musical reading of her critically acclaimed novel, Mémoires sauvées de l’eau, with accompaniment by violinist Marina Chiche. The story revisits the history of the California Gold Rush and explores its consequences on the current natural environment. In the novel, past and present intertwine through myriad characters to chart the odyssey of a civilization that built itself while simultaneously causing destruction. The performance, in French, is in Chancellor Green Rotunda.
The festival closes on September 21 at 5 p.m. with Nous sommes un poème, a recital of music and poetry. Stanislas Roquette, inspired by the thoughts of poet Jean-Pierre Siméon in his 2015 essay “La poésie sauvera le monde” (“Poetry will save the world”), questions our relationship with language while sharing classic and contemporary poems. Most of the poetry is in French, including famous works by Victor Hugo, Louis Aragon and Arthur Rimbaud, along with the work of Andrée Chédid, Henri Pichette, Liliane Wouters, Philippe Jaccottet and Christophe Tarkos. The evening will also feature works from the French chanson—lyric-driven songs—with Les Têtes Raides and Loïc Lantoine. On stage, Roquette is accompanied on guitar and violin by musician Gilles Geenen, and a group of amateur actors at one point will share a collective moment of poetry. The recital, which is in French, will be in Chancellor Green Rotunda.
Tickets, which are free and required for all of the above performances, are available through University Ticketing. Tickets for the film screening are free and must be reserved in advance through Eventbrite. Conversation events are also free but do not require tickets.
All festival events are held in accessible venues. Learn more about accessibility of parking, routes, and venues. Guests in need of other access accommodations are asked to contact the Lewis Center at LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week prior to the event date.
In addition to the ongoing partnership with the Festival d’Avignon, Seuls en Scène continues its new partnership with Festival d’Automne in Paris. Since 1972, the Festival d’Automne à Paris has been assisting artists internationally by producing and presenting their work in contemporary theatre, music, dance, visual arts and cinema at cultural venues throughout Paris.
L’Avant-Scène anticipates a full year of programming beginning on October 2 and 3 in the Class of 1970 Theater at Whitman College with Mon pays de terre rouge, a contemporary play by Nicolas Girard Michelotti, who will also visit campus. Other L’Avant-Scène 25-26 season highlights include a participation in the celebrations of the opening of the new Princeton University Art Museum on October 31, the presentation of Britannicus by Jean Racine at the Art Museum in February 6 and 7, and Le retour au désert by Bernard-Marie Koltès at Rockefeller College on April 17 and 18.
Masse, who curates the Festival, was trained as an actor and director at Lille National Theater alongside his studies in American Literature and Civilization at the University of Lille. He later pursued his theater studies at Amherst College as a Levy-Despas Fellow and a teaching assistant in the Department of French. It is there that he originated L’Avant-Scène, a program that combines language and dramatic training. He has directed nearly 80 full-length productions of canonical and new works of French theater since arriving at Princeton in 2001 and has hosted several prominent theater artists. In 2017, he was named Chevalier of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture.
The festival is presented by the Lewis Center for the Arts, the Department of French and Italian, and L’Avant-Scène with additional support provided by Princeton University’s Office of the Provost; Humanities Council; Princeton Institute for International and Regional Study (PIIRS); Departments of Comparative Literature, German, and Music; Program in European Politics and Society; Princeton Center of Excellence; Rockefeller College; and University Services. International sponsors include Festival d’Avignon, Festival d’Automne in Paris; Cultural Services of the French Embassy – Villa Albertine’s Albertine Foundation; the Education Department of the French Embassy; and Institut français.
Visit the Department of French and Italian website to learn more about L’Avant-Scène.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about this event, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events presented by the Lewis Center each year, most of them free.
