Seuls en Scène 2020 presents “A Conversation with Rituels 1, 2, 3 & 4 Directors Émilie Rousset & Louise Hémon”

Photo by Martin Argyroglo

ÉMILIE ROUSSET is a director, within the company John Corporation she explores different modes of theatrical and performative writing. She uses the archive and the documentary investigation to create pieces, installations, films. She collects vocabularies, ideas, observes movements of thought. Then she moves them around and invents devices where actors embody these words. A superposition is created between the real and the fictional, between the original situation and its copy.

After studying at the TNS school in the staging section, she was an associate artist at the Comédie de Reims. She notably signed Mars-Watchers for the Reims Scènes d’Europe festival. At the Grand Palais, for the Monumenta Kabakov, she created Les Spécialistes, a performative device that is rewritten according to its host context. The play has been performed in many theaters, museums, and festivals. She is co-directing a series of short films with Louise Hémon, Rituel 1: The Birthday, Ritual 2: The Vote, Ritual 3: The Baptism of the Sea. These films have been screened at film and performing arts festivals, as well as ‘at the Center Pompidou. The next episode, Ritual 4: The Great Debate, features the filming of a presidential debate. The projects were created at the Festival d’Automne in Paris and within the New Settings program of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès.

LOUISE HÉMON is a film director, she studied at the Bologna Art University and at the Femis. She is fascinated by the body in trance, caught between rituals and obsessions, which could also be anorexic, body-built or marble-made. She also has a special attachment to mythology and contemporary dance.

After a first short fiction, Onze repas (2010) which was awarded at the Festival of Aguilar (Spain), she turned to experimental films and music videos. In 2014, she produced a documentary epic, L’homme le plus fort, produced by Legato Films and Arte. In 2015, she co-wrote with Emilie Rousset a new short film Ritual 1: Anniversaire, produced by the Centre Pompidou. Her films are shown at international festivals such as Hot Docs Toronto, DokumentART, Côté Court, Off Piste and FIFIB in Bordeaux.

NICOLE BIRMANN-BLOOM is the Dance and Theater Program Officer at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York where she has developed and promoted workshops, festivals, and special projects with French artists, and has managed key French-American programs dedicated to support of performing dance and theater artists since 1999. Trained as a dancer in France and the U.S. (New York), Nicole became a dance instructor, and then, worked abroad for a decade in the public and private sectors. She returned to New York and joined the Cultural Services in 1995.