After accompanying them through the production phase, the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès continues to support artists as they present their projects to the public through its partnerships with five institutions in the Paris region and Lyon. The New Settings programme unfolds over three seasons – autumn, winter and spring –, allowing the Foundation to tailor its support to the time scheme required by creative work and offering as many opportunities as possible to bring that work before the public.
In September, the 2021 edition of New Settings begins with a densely packed autumn season. Taken as a whole, the diverse pieces on the programme trace out a series of portraits of our time, in all its richness and complexity. Amélie Bonnin & Aurélie Charon open the programme with Radio Live – La relève, a hybrid piece that blends theatre, cinema and radio to offer a multifaceted vision of politically engaged youth across the globe. In Gardien Party, Valérie Mréjen & Mohamed El Khatib give the floor to museum and gallery attendants they have met in countries around the world. With Memory Loss, Ann Van Den Broek explores the universal subject of amnesia, which resonates painfully in the contemporary age. Another kind of emotion altogether runs through Éléphant ou le temps suspendu, with Bouchra Ouizguen assembling her Moroccan actors to investigate invisible human forces through a singular form of vocal experimentation. Meanwhile, in SAGA, Marco d’Agostin explores the concept of family in all its guises. Ginevra Panzetti & Enrico Ticconi weave their piece around the symbolic power of the flag – and the unconventional emblem of a parrot – in ARA ! ARA !. Finally, Mathilde Monnier offers a welcome return to the essentials in Records, through a series of six straightforward but powerful portraits of contemporary women.
To warm the winter season, New Settings offers three intense and invigorating productions. Each in their own way, Gaëlle Bourges and Christos Papadopoulos invite us to distinguish reality from perception through their respective pieces (La bande à) LAURA – playing with unsettling symbolic representations – and LARSEN C – where, in an overturning of theatrical conventions, the audience is encouraged to be very aware of the stage context. Just before the festive season takes over, Mette Ingvartsen goes further still, stimulating our desire to dance in the aptly named The Dancing Public.
The third and final season of New Settings, in spring 2022, blends a crucible of influences and inspirations to explode in multiple experiments with the visual arts that shake up the stage. With K minuscule, the visual art duo Elvire Caillon and Léonard Martin simply transpose their artists’ studio to the stage and take part in their own show. Reversing this movement from studio to stage, from visual art to performance, in PLI, circus artist Inbal Ben Haïm works with that most conventional of graphic materials – paper –, transforming it into gymnastic equipment in a piece that is as poetic as it is acrobatic. In Sergueï ensemble, an interactive light installation offers a vibrant visual counterpart to music by Lucie Antunes to produce a uniquely intense and transcendent experience. A more reflective tone is struck in Olivia Grandville’s KLEIN, a choreographic translation of the aesthetic philosophy of the major twentieth-century artist Yves Klein. Katia Kameli & Clara Chabalier, meanwhile, recontextualise in images the sources of La Fontaine’s Fables in their piece Singulis et Simul, a highly evocative and accessible performance that blends several choreographic and cultural practices.
Finally, for the first time, the New Settings programme extends beyond the Paris region. Thanks to a new partnership with Les Subs, a socially engaged organisation that seeks to accompany contemporary artistic practices in all their diversity, in April 2022 New Settings will enjoy a season in Lyon. ARA ARA ! by Ginevra Panzetti & Enrico Ticconi, and The Dancing Public by Mette Ingvartsen, both from the current programme, are joined by two projects by duo Clédat & Petitpierre that were supported by the Foundation as part of previous instalments of New Settings: Les Merveilles (New Settings #10) and Abysse (New Settings #4).
