Elsa Rauchs

Elsa Rauchs is an actor and director from Luxembourg. She trained at the Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles and KASK in Ghent. For ten years she has been an active member of the theatre collective Independent Little Lies. In her theatre practice Rauchs examines issues around the accessibility of cultural institutions with the aim of creating diversity within the team and the audience. Here she uses theatrical tools to establish spaces for unexpected communities.

Participatory processes occupy a central role in her work. For example, AMER | AMER, co-directed with Jérôme Michez, invites one person from the audience to take the role of the mother alongside the actor who plays her son. AMER | AMER plays with the boundaries of storytelling and revolves around the relationship that is being formed in front of the audience’s eyes. Since 2022 Rauchs, together with Claire Wagener, has run Independent Little Lies’ Biergerbühn (citizens’ stage), a platform that is accessible to all, where people from different backgrounds meet to make theatre together in weekly workshops. In this project that brings amateur and professional actors together on stage, two plays have been created that engage with otherness and social circumstances: Doheem – Fragments d’intimités (2022) and The Stranger Song (2025).