The Vivarium Studio - Founded in 2003 by Philippe Quesne, a set designer with extensive experience in theatre, opera and contemporary art exhibits, the well named company is resolutely focused on the living as it pursues an ongoing observation of the behaviour of that strange social animal, the human being. Consisting in a group of diligent accomplices, Vivarium Studio enjoyed immediate success, attracting enthusiastic audiences to its theatre laboratory in France, Germany, Finland, the United States and Brazil. With Quesne acting as artistic director, the group creates hybrid works, theatrical contraptions that obscure the boundaries between theatre and performance art. In these diverse environments, the members of the troupe compose a sort of tableau vivant on stage, erasing the tidy contours of a character or simulating a performative drama developed in situ (such as their 2006 piece D’après Nature), where the banality of reality reveals its unsettling strangeness.
