Philippe Quesne / Vivarium Studio (FR)

At the boundary between the human and the puppet, the peasant and the scarecrow, the five masked characters of “Farm Fatale” appear and settle against a spotless white background. The audience is then led into a world highly evocative of the farm, where lives a group of poet scarecrows that run an independent radio station, sing, play music, invent slogans and sometimes wax philosophical. Masked and speaking in distorted voices, these contemplative clowns attuned to the pulses of the planet may turn out to be somewhat familiar. In fact, these men and women striving for a better world are mostly daydreamers, poets and activists with a charming and intoxicating tendency to marvel at the beauty and diversity of nature. These are disarmingly funny and kind heroes living at plant or animal level, somehow trying to steer clear of a rampant capitalism that destroys forests, lands, and oceans, and to save the multiple lives of those teeming, speaking, poeticizing and thinking around us.

Philippe Quesne, born in 1970, received his education in Visual Arts. For 10 years he designed sets for theatre, operas, and exhibitions. In 2003, he created the Vivarium Studio Company as a laboratory for theatrical innovation and collaboration between painters, actors, dancers and musicians. As he did as a child, collecting insects, he now works and studies small communities under his microscope. The scenography is used as an ecosystem in which he immerses his actors into.