Elise Vigneron & Azusa Takeuchi

Trained in visual arts, circus arts and puppetry at École Nationale Supérieure des Arts de la Marionnette in Charleville-Mézières, Elise Vigneron is a stage director, puppeteer and visual artist. She heads Théâtre de l’Entrouvert, a company registered with France’s Ministry of Culture. Her projects bring ephemeral materials to life and capture audiences’ attention through specific stagings. Shown internationally, her work takes the form of long-term collaborations in the United States, Germany and Norway. She is associate-artist at Théâtre de Châtillon, La Halle aux Grains in Blois and Théâtre Joliette in Marseille.

Azusa Takeuchi is a Japanese dancer and choreographer. A graduate of NIHON University of the Arts in Tokyo and trained at Centre de Développement Chorégraphique National (CDCN) Toulouse/Occitanie, as a dancer and co-creator she collaborates with artists from multiple horizons, including Myriam Gourfink, Mladen Materic, Franck Vigroux, Pierre-Yves Macé, Motoko Hirayama and Elise Vigneron, and has worked as a choreographer since 2010. As a soloist, Azusa Takeuchi won the Masdanza Prize at the Yokohama Dance Collection EX 2011, and was a finalist at the 16Masdanza International Contemporary Dance Festival in 2011 and the Toyota Choreography Award in 2012. In 2019 her <40Winks> piece was selected by Aerowaves. Also in 2019, she presented her first large-format piece, Kara-da-kara, at Théâtre Garonne-Toulouse. She is currently preparing a new solo project, that she will originate in 2027.

Azusa Takeuchi and Elise Vigneron wish to advance further in their explorations of metamorphosis, the ephemeral and the relationship between the animate and the inanimate through a project that spans the arts of movement, puppetry and the visual arts. The throughline of their residency will be mono no aware (物の哀れ): a Japanese aesthetic and spiritual concept, often translated as “empathy towards things” or “sensitivity to ephemera”, which has no equivalent western concept. Mono no aware describes a subtle sensation, a form of melancholy, that arises from an awareness of the transient nature of all things and the heightened appreciation of their beauty this inspires. It invites personal reflections on notions of existence, time, life and death. Takeuchi and Vigneron will meet with Japanese visual artists and craftspeople working with materials in transformation, and ask them about their thoughts and experiences of mono no aware. Their accounts will be recorded by an anthropologist and collected into a database. This database will then provide frameworks for improvisations and concepts which Takeuchi and Vigneron can transpose to the stage and explore the materials in question through their practice of dance and animated arts.

Portrait Azusa Takeushi : © Rio Saito