Princeton French Theater Festival - Conversation with Hortense Archambault and Tiago Rodrigues

Seuls en Scène 2024 presents a Conversation with Hortense Archambault & Tiago Rodrigues

As part of Seuls en Scène’s new partnership with Festival d’Avignon, a conversation with former Festival d’Avignon Director Hortense Archambault and current Director Tiago Rodrigues kicks off the festival. They will be joined by Mohamed Bouabdallah, the Cultural Counselor of the Embassy of France in the United States. Florent Masse, the director of L’Avant-Scène and artistic director of Seuls en Scène, will moderate the conversation.

The conversation will be in French. Duration: 80 minutes.

About the Guests:

Hortense Archambault led Festival d’Avignon for ten years from 2003 until 2013. With Vincent Baudriller, her co-director, she helped bring the renowned festival into the 21st century devising bold innovations and upping its international stature. Director of MC93 Maison de la Culture de Seine-Saint-Denis Bobigny since 2015, Archambault leads their project to take theatre to the people of Seine-Saint-Denis and beyond, focusing on the issue of the commons, their shared cultural resources. At MC93, audiences, artists, teachers, and communities come together to weave a rich tapestry of experiences and outlooks they call La Fabrique d’expériences. Their users form the fabric of their institutional workshops and residencies. Their meet ups are an open invitation to local people and their contributions ensure they remain in step with their environment. This institution is a place for creativity and expression where imagination is the watchword.

Portuguese actor Tiago Rodrigues crossed paths with the Belgian company Tg Stan at the age of twenty. There he developed his acting, his writing for the theatre, and his taste for the collective. As an author and director, he founded the company Mundo Perfeito with Magda Bizarro in 2003 before becoming director of the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II in Lisbon from 2015 to 2021. Combining true stories and fiction and weaving together the intimate and the political, Tiago Rodrigues’s shows are deeply influenced by the idea of writing with and for the actors, and by his quest for a transformation of our conscience through the tools of theatre. His goal? To bring us together to question our world thanks to the power of the words, of the bodies, and of the imagination of the spectators. He currently serves as director of the Festival d’Avignon, an institution he knows well, having presented several shows here, including Antony and Cleopatra in 2015, Sopro in 2017, The Cherry Orchard in 2021, By heart and Dans la mesure de l’impossible in 2023, and Hécube pas Hécube in 2024.

Location: East Pyne Room 010

Admission: Free and open to public