Archives of Feelings

A celebration is over. Glasses lie empty, music has faded, fatigue settles over the room. Eight people remain – relatives, friends, chance acquaintances. What began as a wedding ritual transforms into an unstable social structure. Intimacy becomes a demand, care a question of power. It is in this moment that Gisèle Vienne’s new work begins.

A co-production with the Berliner Festspiele, the piece marks the first collaboration between the Franco-Austrian choreographer and director and the French writer Marie NDiaye, who has created the text for the performance. Both artists share a precise gaze on the subtle, often invisible forms of violence and control inscribed in language, gesture and relationships. 

Where NDiaye exposes psychic shifts, familial dependencies and social role models with literary precision, Vienne translates these tensions into bodies, time and choreographic density. Together, they shape a stage event that does not assert power but renders it palpable; and the music of Icelandic cellist and Oscar winner Hildur Guðnadóttir and Polina Zhukova, aka CCONTRARY, creates a sensual yet precise soundscape.

The work is structured like a portrait gallery. Each figure tells its own story – while also existing as part of a network defined by interdependencies. Present, memory and anticipated future overlay one another. Themes such as eco-anxiety, racism, sexuality, social origin, and the notion of “passing” – moving through the world as someone else – thread through the piece as latent forces. Identity appears not as a stable core, but as something continuously renegotiated under social pressure.

Presented as part of the Berliner Festspiele’s 2026/27 Performing Arts Season, devoted to myths and rituals, this stage work becomes itself a contemporary ritual: not a space for reconciliation, but a precise experiment. It lays bare how community forms, how power operates, and how fragile the promises of intimacy, protection and belonging have become.

Gisèle Vienne is one of the defining voices in international performance and theatre. Her works – including Jerk, Crowd, L’Etang and most recently Extra Life – are known for their experimental approach to time, uncanny precision, and depiction of latent violence beneath the surface of seemingly familiar situations. In collaboration with Marie NDiaye, whose writing is renowned for its radical ambivalence and unsparing analysis of familial and societal power structures, this research gains a new linguistic sharpness – and a compelling theatrical form.