Aliénor Dauchez is a visual artist, stage director and the artistic director of music theater company La Cage, which is based in Berlin and Paris. Making her debut as a director with Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop and later with Zafraan Ensemble, Il Profondo, Musikfabrik and Les Cris de Paris, Aliénor Dauchez has created music theater forms which integrate visual elements and involve musicians in a major way. She staged works like „Démesure“, „Votre Faust“ by Henri Pousseur and “L’Ailleurs de l’autre”, which have been performed at Radialsystem V in Berlin, Nouveau Théâtre de Montreuil in Paris, MC2 in Grenoble, Theater Basel as well as Harpa Reykjavik, Oper Reims and La Scala Paris. Her visual and performative works were exhibited at Beach Office, Galerie Arndt and Haus am Lützowplatz in Berlin, as well as Galerie DIX9 in Paris, Couvent de la Tourette by Le Corbusier in Éveux, Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Tbilissi Art Fair and Kunstverein Hildesheim.
FACTS:
1: My name comes from a french queen who left the french king to marry the king of England. A middle-age feminist. Hard to pronounce.
2: 6000 men are coming to the Berghain’s Schlackehalle every Easter for the biggest sex-party in the world.
3: The Schlackehalle where we play is around 18m high.
QUESTIONS:
1. What is the biggest inspiration for your music?
I actually don’t play music, I’m just not good at it. That’s why I admire musicians and like to collaborate with them. Music is a way to speak with each other without words. In fact, it can be much more precise than words.
2. How and when did you get into making music?
My mother was a kind of cabaret-singer. She sings stuff like Patricia Kaas, Edith Piaf, Simon & Garfunkel.
3. What are 5 of your favourite albums of all time?
Bobby Lapointe, l’integrale… but honestly I almost never listen to recorded music. So I’ll tell you about the best concerts I’ve been to:
– Dmitri Kourliandski’s Rite of Spring with Teodor Currentzis
– ‘Have a good day!’ a piece for 10 supermarket-cashiers by Vaiva Grainytė, Lina Lapelytė and Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė
– Stephen Paul Taylor’s concerts at the Maybachufer-fleemarket (I actually watched this one only on YouTube)
– Heiner Goebbels’s Max Black at the Bouffes du Nord
– Andromeda Mega Express Orchestra, any concert
4. What do you associate with Berlin?
When I arrived in Berlin in 2006, it was a beautiful hot summer with football—world-cup-flair.
I ate a big space-cake on the roof of our nice building and my life changed completely: I decided to quit studying engineering and started my own art-projects.
5. What’s your favourite place in your town?
The Comenius Garden in Neukölln.
6. If there was no music in the world, what would you do instead?
You mean if everybody was deaf? We would continue to configure rhythms with our bodies, with light, with objects. Every composition would sound like the piece ‘Schattenstück’ from Manos Tsangaris: silent but very musical.
7. What was the last record/music you bought?
The last concert I saw was the installation ‘Winzig und der Elefant’ from Manos Tsangaris at the Akademie der Künste: 12 short pieces performed in different places in the building for a very small audience.
8. Who would you most like to collaborate with?
Honestly the team I’m collaborating with for our new piece ‘I’d rather sink’ is a dream team: Michael Kleine designed the costumes, Dmitri Kourliandski wrote music, with Bastian Zimmermann as a dramaturg.
9. What was your best gig (as performer or spectator)?
Démesure, the first piece under the name of my company La Cage, with Zafraan Ensemble im Delphi-Kino in Weißensee. But it was so radical in a way, that we never managed to play it again until now.
10. How important is technology to your creative process?
You mean the complex technology of a violin? Or of live-electronics? Technology is a means, not the end. Often the more simply it is used, the more place there is for the poetry. Sometimes one needs lots of technology, sometimes nothing at all.
11. Do you have siblings and how do they feel about your career/art?
I have two bigger brothers. They both make fun of me and the things I’m doing. That’s what bigger brothers do, right?
vimeo.com/325299324
I’d rather sink – Instructions mystiques, stage directed by Aliénor Dauchez, premiers at Halle am Wriezener Bahnhof on Thursday, 6th June 2019, with two additional performances following on 7th and 8th. Tickets for all shows can be purchased here.
Photo © Sonja Müller
