ACADÉMIE DU FESTIVAL D’AIX WORKSHOP BIOGRAPHICAL BOOKLET — 2017 JUNE, 26 TO JULY, 5 — Opera Creation Workshop The Opera Creation Workshop is open each year to young creators from all disciplines and is a place for refl ection and discussion on artistic opera-related issues. This workshop seeks to define current values of opera and the tasks it will assume in the future. Stage director, Katie Mitchell, will open the debate on current opera creation together with its multi-disciplinary guise and enlighten it with their own experiences. The Opera Creation Workshop is an workshop The enoa network, of which the Festival d’Aix and its Académie are founder members, was born from the wish of a number of operatic institutions to work more closely together to support the professional integration of the young artists and to support the development of their artistic ambitions. With the backing of the Creative Europe programme, enoa launched its new programme designed for performers and creators, Young Opera Makers. It aims to provide young artists with a first-rate training pathway using contemporary, multidisciplinary approach to opera; to give them experience of performing and of the creative process; and to support the development and dissemination of new operatic works which contribute to diversifying audiences. Today, thirteen members, thirteen associate partners, over a thousand young artists and some three hundred professionals make up the enoa community. Follow on @enoacommunity European network of opera academies - enoa enoa_community www.enoa-community.com TUTOR STAGE DIRECTOR Katie MITCHELL PARTICIPANTS STAGE DIRECTOR | – Snape Maltings Finn BEAMES (artist name: FXXX BXXXXX) STAGE DIRECTOR Bérénice COLLET STAGE DIRECTOR Aliénor DAUCHEZ COMPOSER | – Snape Maltings Petter EKMAN COMPOSER Alexandra GRIMAL COMPOSER Patiparn JAIKAMPAN COMPOSER Oliver LEITH PLAYWRIGHT Laura LOMAS STAGE DIRECTOR | – Latvian National Opera Viesturs MEIKSANS STAGE DIRECTOR | – Dutch National Opera Rennik-Jan NEGGERS PLAYWRIGHT | – Theaterakademie August Everding Kornelius PAEDE SET DESIGNER | – Operosa llija VIŠNJIC’ COMPOSER Jue WANG STAGE DIRECTOR Eva-Maria WEISS > TUTOR KATIE MITCHELL STAGE DIRECTOR • UNITED KINGDOM After studying literature, British artist Katie Mitchell began her career as an assistant in theatres, including the Royal Shakespeare Company. That’s where she directed, upon returning in 1996 from a cycle of residences in Eastern European (and particularly Polish) theatres, Euripides’s The Phoenician Women, which was enthusiastically received. Her company, Classics on a shoestring, then started creating ever more successful and acclaimed shows, reimagining classics from Greece, Britain, Scandinavia, and Russia and giving them new life through her sense of rhythm and use of music, dance, and video in her directions. Working with the most prestigious British and German theatres, Katie Mitchell has also led projects for television or the opera, and experimented with innovative forms, adapting novels for the theatre and collaborating with her contemporaries such as the writer Martin Crimp or the scientist Stephen Emmott, with whom she created Ten Billion in 2012. Katie Mitchell has been an Associate Director at the RSC, National Theatre and The Royal Court Theatre. She was awarded an OBE in 2009 for services to drama and has recently been appointed as the Visiting Chair in Opera Studies at Oxford University for 2016-2017. Recent theatre includes: Anatomy of a Suicide (Royal Court); 4.48 Psychosis (Schauspielhaus, Hamburg); The Maids (Toneelgroep, Amsterdam); Shadows (Eurydice Speaks) (Schaubühne, Berlin); Cleansed (National Theatre); Ophelia’s Room (Schaubühne, Berlin and Royal Court); Reisende auf einem Bein (Schauspielhaus, Hamburg); Happy Days (Schauspielhaus, Hamburg); Brandstichter Festival: a remounting of five previous productions of Katie Mitchell’s work (Stadschouwburg, Amsterdam);2071 (Royal Court); The Cherry Orchard (Young Vic); The Forbidden Zone (Salzburg Festival and Schaubühne, Berlin); A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (Vienna Burgtheater); Lungs, The Yellow Wallpaper (Schaubühne, Berlin); Everything Else You Know from the Movies (Schauspielhaus, Hamburg); Say it with Flowers, The Trial of Ubu (Hampstead Theatre); Night Train (Schauspiel, Cologne, Avignon Festival and Theater Treffen), Ten Billion (Royal Court, Avignon Festival); Rings of Saturn, Waves (Schauspiel, Cologne) and Hansel & Gretel, A Woman Killed with Kindness (National Theatre), De Meiden (Avignon Festival). Recent opera includes: Pelléas et Mélisande (Festival d’Aix-en-Provence); Lucia di Lammermoor (Royal Opera House); Alcina (Festival d’Aix-en-Provence); The Way Back Home (ENO/Young Vic); Trauernacht and The House Taken Over (Festival d’Aix-en-Provence); Le Vin herbé (Staatsoper, Berlin); Written on Skin (Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and Royal Opera House); Al gran sole carico d’amore (Staatsoper, Berlin and Salzburg Festival); Orest (De Nederlandse Opera) and Clemency (Royal Opera House). Film and television includes: Untitled Short Film (Warp/ Film4); The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd, Jenufa, Rough for Theatre 2 and The Turn of the Screw. > PARTICIPANT FINN BEAMES (artist name: FXXX BXXXXX) STAGE DIRECTOR • UNITED-KINGDOM – Snape Maltings FXXX is a British director and writer based in London and working internationally. He was the winner of the 2015 Genesis Future Directors Award at the Young Vic, as part of which he directed Man: 3 Plays by Tennessee Williams which sold out in the Clare theatre. He held the 2015 Lina Bo Bardi Fellowship, granted by the British Council and Sesc Sã o Paulo, after which he is creating an architecture-theatre hybrid project with Paloma Gormley, supported in the UK through the Jerwood Choreographic Research Project and by the British Council, and previously by Stroom Den Haag in the Netherlands. Titled Mass, the participatory piece is now being developed with London International Festival of Theatre and 10 other national partners. In 2016, FXXX began collaborating with opera singer Lucia Lucas in Germany and the UK with support from the Artists’ International Development Fund at Arts Council England, and started writing a new opera through the Music Theatre Creation Lab at Helsinki Festival with Santa Bušs. In 2014, through his producing alter ego, Oedipa, he libretto-wrote and directed a sold-out run of a new opera about depression, funded by The Wellcome Trust and ACE. In 2014, he also wrote, directed and designed a new music theatre work for the London Sinfonietta with composer Gavin Higgins, and in 2014-2015 he was a director and librettist on the Jerwood Opera Writing Programme at Aldeburgh Music. FXXX has since been commissioned with composer Santa Buš s to write a new opera for the 2018 Jaunie Latvijas Kamermu�zik�i in Saulkrasti (Latvia), and is also under commission to the Young Vic to write a play. For 2017, Oedipa is a Links Partner with the Royal Opera House, and will be developing an ethical producing model alongside senior staff members, as well as developing music theatre and opera projects. > PARTICIPANT BÉRÉNICE COLLET STAGE DIRECTOR • FRANCE French stage director Bérénice Collet works both in the theatre and opera fields. For the opera, after Britten’s The Little sweep at Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, she made the world premiere of Germaine Tillion’s Le Verfügbar aux Enfers, at the Théâtre du Châtelet in 2007, largely greeted by the press and the audience. The production was also performed in 2010 in Ravensbrück for the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the camp. Since 2011, other productions include Verdi’s Rigoletto, Weber’s Abu Hassan and Mascagni’s Zanetto as guest artist of Herblay’s theatre, nearby Paris. In 2012, she was asked to work on the revival of Strehler Le Nozze di Figaro at the Opéra National de Paris. In 2014, she directed Barber’s Vanessa at the Opéra de Metz and her production of Menotti’s The Consul was performed in the Théâtre de l’Athénée in Paris. In 2017, she directed a workshop on Fairy Queen by Purcell at Conservatoire Hector Berlioz in Paris. For the theatre, since 2004, she directed Victor Haïm’s La Valse du hasard in Brest; H2O, a performance for two actors, a videast and two electronic musicians; Le Système périodique, from the book by Primo Levi. Recently, she staged L’Infusion by Pauline Sales, Dario Fo’s Une femme seule, in Paris and on tour, and recently a project for young audience commissioned by the European Union and the Unesco. She is now working in residence at La Maison du Comédien - Maria Casarès for her new project about Erythrea and the Erythreans, based on a book written by the French journalist Léonard Vincent, and on refugees’ testimonies escaped from their country. Among her projects, besides her creation about Erythrea, she is working on Sounds of silence (about silent movie and opera) with Italian composer Virginia Guastella and Music for (a little more than) a while, with French conductor Nicolas Kruger, about the passing of time in music. > PARTICIPANT ALIÉNOR DAUCHEZ © Sonja Mueller STAGE DIRECTOR • FRANCE Aliénor Dauchez works as director for music theater and visual artist in Berlin and Paris. She studied urban system engineering as well as visual arts with Gregor Schneider and Giuseppe Penone at the UdK Berlin and the ENSBA Paris. She gained experience in music theater as assistant of Anna Viebrock, Sasha Waltz and Heiner Goebbels and as a fellow of Deutsche Bank Stiftung in the course of the program Akademie Musiktheater heute. She is at the moment fellow