performance  | duration 60 min

c/o location being defined

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Con l’Animale is the second part of the ‘Trilogie des liens‘, a project in which Massimo Furlan and Claire de Ribaupierre ponder our relationships with nature and its inhabitants, to understand how an environment is made up: who the protagonists are, how they interact, how they evolve contextually and constantly. To understand what unites us, what we all have in common. How we build balances or cause imbalances, how we create alliances or break them, how we live together.

The show Con l’Animale starts from interviews with people who have a special relationship with the wild world: wildlife guards, gamekeepers, fishermen, local hunters, ecology theorists, and philosophers. The stories told reflect the wealth of knowledge and connections with animals. Rivers and forests reveal environments rich in contaminations, condensing some of the paradoxes of our time. The artists listen to their stories, anecdotes, and experiences and ponder their habits. Their actions and practices combine tradition and contemporary issues, necessary needs (population regulation, human feeding, etc.) and Sunday pastimes, intimate understanding of animals in their environments and questions about human intervention in natural ecosystems. Today, more and more, we are neglecting ancestral knowledge based on the balance between what we take from nature and what we give it time to replenish. Not knowing the environment anymore means neglecting it, taking excessive advantage of it means destroying it. Without knowledge of the intelligence of what surrounds us, we destroy ourselves.

a project by Massimo Furlan and Claire de Ribaupierre direction Massimo Furlan dramaturgy Claire de Ribaupierre technical and video direction Jérôme Vernez lighting Etienne Gaches sound Aurélien Chouzenoux administration and production Noémie Doutreleau distribution Jérôme Pique production Numero23Prod. co-production Théâtre Vidy – Lausanne (CH), Les 2 scènes – Besançon with the support of Ville de Lausanne, État de Vaud, Pro Helvetia – Fondation Suisse pour la Culture, Loterie Romande (en cours), programme européen de coopération transfrontalière Interreg France-Suisse dans le cadre du projet CDuLaB.

Foto di Pierre Nydegger

After training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, Swiss set designer and visual artist Massimo Furlan worked with various dance and theatre companies. In 2003, he founded his own company dedicated to the performing arts, Numéro23Prod, to interrogate the act of representation outside the confines of genres. His multiple performances, essentially articulated around humour and contrast, question popular manifestations, the notion of the team and the themes of image, duration, childhood, memory and play. In 1988 Furlan received an award from the Irène Reymond foundation in French-speaking Switzerland and in 2001 a Prix culturel vaudois jeunes créateurs beaux-arts. In 2014, he received the Swiss Cultural Theatre Prize. Her works have been presented in theatres and festivals throughout Europe.

Since 2023 Claire de Ribaupierre has been the dramaturge of Massimo Furlan’s creations. She holds a degree in Literature and conducts research in the fields of anthropology and contemporary images and literature.