Featured Artists

Joël Pommerat

Playwright and Director

Joël Pommerat is known for his masterful use of stage elements to create theater that is both refined and rigorously precise. One of the defining traits of his practice is that he stages only the works he writes himself. For Pommerat, there is no hierarchy between text and direction; the script and the staging evolve side by side throughout the rehearsal process.

From 2007 to 2010, he was invited by Peter Brook to serve as artist-in-residence at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris. Between 2010 and 2015, he was appointed Associate Artist at both the Odéon–Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris and the Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles in Brussels. Since 2014, he has been running workshops at the Maison Centrale in Arles, with long-term prisoners. Pommerat’s artistic pursuit is to create a visual theater that is at once intimate and spectacular, foregrounding the presence of the actor and generating a sense of awe in the audience through a distinctive mode of storytelling onstage.

Many of his works, including his reimagining of the fairy-tale trilogy and Ça ira (1) Fin de Louis (2015), continue to explore the most fundamental and universal dimensions of human experience.