Théâtre de Vidy
Season 2026-2027
- The Vidy-Lausanne Theatre, a center for Francophone theater creation, is located in the heart of French-speaking Switzerland. Taking advantage of the privileged position of the Vaud capital at the crossroads of Europe, it serves as a space open to the world, where Latin and Germanic theater and artistic cultures engage in dialogue.
- Its building, designed by Zurich artist and architect Max Bill – trained at the Bauhaus – for the “Educate and Create” section of the 1964 Swiss National Exhibition in Lausanne, houses four performance spaces and a bar-lounge overlooking the Vidy beach, with views of Lake Geneva and the Alps.
Shuttles: free round-trip shuttle services from Geneva for theatergoers attending performances in various theaters in Geneva.
- 25 September and 2 October: En Sicil, by Jeanne Balibar
- 25 September: Taglit – Droit du Sang, by Ruth Rosenthal
- 2 October: Los inescalables Alpes, buscando a Currito, by La Chachi
- 5 and 8 November: Questions for John, by Simon McBurney
- 2 December: Mi madre y el dinero, by Anacarsis Ramos
- 16 and 17 January: Faust, by Romeo Castellucci
More information
Programme
- Room 64, Charles Apothéloz
- Duration: 1h30
- based on the text by Juliette Blamont
Theatre in the field: the audience gathers on a farm, looking at a rural landscape. Here, actors and witnesses share their different perspectives and ways of understanding this landscape. Through the attuned listening to the soil by a couple of passionate scientists, the perspective of an NGO director involved in agricultural and ecological policies, the testimony of a local farmer, and the analysis of bird song by a bioacoustician, the field becomes a stage where lives and expertise are shared. Stretching out for hundreds of metres, it then comes into focus as a space that is both natural and cultural, interwoven with knowledge, emotions and contradictions, preparing the ground for new possible alliances.
- Room 76, La Passerelle
- Duration: 1h
A group of friends has met up in what might be a rehearsal room, or a theatre between performances. For want of anything better, they improvise scenes using whatever they find in the room or within themselves. A snippet of music, perhaps the memory of a text, a broom, a trolley, the smallest thing they happen upon — all become catalysts for incongruous and acrobatic situations. Following Lab Rats, the incredible tightrope walkers Marc Oosterhoff and Owen Winship pursue their expressive and inventive exploration of the acrobatic arts. Uncertain lifts and fragile balances might well hold the key to a rock solid friendship!
- Room 17, Le Pavillon
- Duration: 1h15
Winter Family (Ruth Rosenthal and Xavier Klaine) are a duo specialising in experimental music and documentary theatre. Here, they continue their exploration of Israeli society by deconstructing the Zionist narrative. Taglit – droit du sang / Zakirat – droit au retour is an investigation into the trips offered to Jewish youth worldwide by an international Zionist organisation, ostensibly to discover Israel, while also encouraging them to settle there. These trips perfunctorily gloss over the tragedy and reality of the Palestinian situation. Ruth Rosenthal leads us on one of these aforementioned trips — until the actress Mayya Sanbar takes over to relate the Palestinian side of the story, shedding light on the confiscation of her country and her people’s right of return.
- Room 17, Le Pavillon
- Duration: 1h
María del Mar Suárez, a.k.a. La Chachi, is known for her intense and deeply personal style of flamenco that honours tradition while drawing on the energy of krump, her performances verging on trance-like states. Accompanied by a singer and two flamenco musicians, who play the same piece over and over again with increasing intensity, La Chachi lights up the stage with her untamed energy, offering her body to dance as others do to medicine, in order to experience love, longing, clarity, attraction, perdition, and metamorphosis. She reinvents her performance every night: her punk dance prayer is dedicated to the burning desire to see a loved one again, and to that end, to overcome the insurmountable, to transcend the dizziness of the highest heights.
- Room 96, René Gonzalez
- Duration: 1h25
La Simone is the story of a wise grandmother, a country seamstress. This farmer’s sister shuffles with the cautious steps of a hedgehog, exalting everyday life through her discreet presence and her capacity for wonder. Her absence leaves a void, but her enveloping voice reminds us to cherish our individuality and to embrace that slowness which reveals beauty even in the darkness. Adrien Rupp here adapts for the stage a story he published in 2026 with the Éditions La Veilleuse: a portrait of a woman as an example of resistance to the alienation of this fast-paced world.
- Room 64, Charles Apothéloz
- Duration: 1h30
- Language: Spanish with French and English surtitles
Calentamiento is the warm-up before the dance. Regarded as the leading figure of contemporary flamenco, Rocío Molina is a virtuoso, radical and free-spirited artist who wields dance like a scalpel, laying bare the raw, intense inner workings of bodies, emotions and life. In this show, she displays her training, the tabla de pies (footwork scales), the strict discipline, mingled with sweat and the rising tide of desire, in a physical encounter with the infinite. She then invites a dancer and master of the compás, along with four Gypsy singers, for a liberating flamenco experience, an endless celebration of energy, desire, dance and song.
- Room 17, Le Pavillon
- Duration: 1h30
The Dreams Come True Collective (formerly the Cie Yan Duyvendak) creates theatrical installations designed to explore thought-provoking contemporary social mechanisms. In Dear Luigi, I Hate You, a restorative justice process is applied to a murder case, inspired by the 2024 murder of the CEO of a major American health insurance group by Luigi Mangione. This speculative fiction imagines a fictional encounter between the shooter and the victim’s widow, facilitated by real-life restorative justice practitioners and the novelist Adèle Yon. This project highlights the complexity of conflicts, the importance of listening, and the fragile yet essential possibility of dialogue as an alternative to punitive justice.
- Room 96, René Gonzalez
In this solo performance, Émilie Charriot welcomes and embodies the emotional turmoil and keen criticism of Kafka’s Letter to His Father, an extraordinary hundred-page letter that was never delivered to its intended recipient. Blaming himself for much, yet also detailing his fear and the strict, borderline absurd upbringing he received, Kafka navigates tenderness and hatred, fear and rebellion in an indictment that does not shy away from the grotesque or the farcical. He is not after antagonism, but rather solace, in order to “make life and death easier for both of us”. Émilie Charriot transforms this text into a nuanced and paradoxical meditation on legacies and mentors, and what they enable or destroy.
- Room 64, Charles Apothéloz
- Duration: 1h30
- Language: English
Following the success of The Encounter in 2015, actor and director Simon McBurney, founder of the renowned maverick theatre company Complicité, is finally returning to Vidy. Even though John Berger has passed away, Simon McBurney still has questions for him. They knew each other well: they spent time in each other’s company and exchanged ideas for over 25 years. In the face of war, exploitation, the search for solidarity, and knowledge that struggles to metabolise into action, what has become of the bonds that unite us? Why do we destroy what we love? And what can art do today?
Simon McBurney is an enthusiastic and alert storyteller – no one else knows better than he how to blend narratives and technology, images and movement into embodied, living words. Alone on stage, the British actor questions his former kindred spirit, John Berger. And so we are invited to step into a space for questions and poetry, where the present stands still, swarming with questions – and our desire to act is revived with a fruitful power.
- Room 76, La Passerelle
- Duration: 1h15
A reading of excerpts from a unique book by John Berger, a literary work that drifts between prose and poetry, confessions and reflections on art, love, displacement, time and absence.
- Room 17, Le Pavillon
- Duration: 1h30
On the Vidy stage, a griot musician plays the kora and a sampler, scoring in real time a film which is being shot live in Bamako. We follow the Malian actors Diarrah Dembélé and Kassim Dagnogo as they travel through the Malian capital on foot or by motorbike, filmed by Alfousseny and Souleymane Konaté. These visionary investigators are filming a live sequence shot, between documentary and science fiction. Permeable clay soils, medicinal plants, resilient solutions and solidarities coexist with fuel shortages, Chinese interference and an unstable democracy… What if the future already existed elsewhere? An exhilarating musical road trip, in search of possible futures.
- Room 76, La Passerelle
- Duration: 1h15
A choral reading tracing the presence of animals in the work of John Berger. A collage of texts curated by Katya Berger-Andreadakis, read by Jacob Berger, Katya Berger-Andreadakis and Yves Berger
- Room 64, Charles Apothéloz
À la manière d’un conte, Joël Pommerat imagine la rencontre de deux jeunes filles liées par une amitié qui défie les lois du réel et l’autorité des adultes. Tout oppose Jade l’inquiète et Marjorie la forte tête. Mais comme les contraires qui s’attirent, elles se lient d’une amitié fusionnelle qui les entrainent aux confins des limites du corps et de l’esprit. Les mots du dramaturge et des illusions théâtrales magistrales et délicates dessinent un monde en clair-obscur où se joue une « déambulation dans la construction de soi » envoûtante et sans leçon de morale, par-delà les peurs et les cauchemars. Une ode paradoxale et nuancée aux puissances créatrices de l’adolescence face à des réalités inconcevables.
- Room 17, Le Pavillon
- Duration: 1h30
- Language: Franch and Arabic
Five actresses, an empty stage and 250 years of history: Ravage tout court sets out to explore Europe’s recurring involvement in the history of Palestine, or how Palestine and the events unfolding there concern us here in Europe — as we attempt to extricate ourselves from beneath the anvil of current events and set our bodies in motion through embodied reflection. Eight years after Décris-ravage, a sprawling documentary-performance (Vidy, 2016), this “impatient”, active and precise version recounts the history of empires and imperialism, of alliances and betrayals, of weaponised hatred and contempt for peoples. All with the same critical mind, brilliantly sharp syntheses and artful performance, carried by the enthusiasm and triumph of resistance.
- Room 17, Le Pavillon
- Duration: 1h30
Elina Kulikova and Dima Efremov, two exiled Russian artists and seasoned musicians, present three performances reflecting on the Russian war in Ukraine through music and autobiographical fiction: an act of resistance that turns art against culture, when the latter serves as a vehicle for violence. Une Nuit blanche — the last part of the triptych, presented independently of the other two — is dedicated to Dima Efremov, a virtuoso queer pianist and activist. It explores forced exile, music, celebration and the militant initiatives that aid oppressed artists in Russia and help them escape. Inspired by the world of pop music, Une Nuit blanche evokes political repression and the joy that fuels resistance through music, laughter and dance. The trilogy also consists of Un Champ brûlé, which explores Russia’s great classical and musical heritage and its relationship to violence and the current state of war — and Un Endroit perdu, which delves into folk music, and especially songs of mourning, in a performative lamentation on the desire to kill and the memory of trauma.
- Room 64, Charles Apothéloz
- Duration: 1h40
Catol Teixeira undertakes a resolutely collective form of writing, rooted in connection, contagion and exchange, much like that shared territory, the mouth—where pleasure mingles with pain, where speech takes shape in the joyful absurdity of not understanding, when meaning eludes us or transforms. Baby Teeth is a chorus of voices, languages and gestures that echo, interact, escape, bite and transform each other.
- 15h
- Room 17, Le Pavillon
- Duration: 50’
Un Champ brûlé explores Russia’s great classical and musical heritage and its relationship to violence and the current state of war.
- 17h
- Room 17, Le Pavillon
- Duration: 1h
Un Endroit perdu delves into folk music, and especially songs of mourning, in a performative lamentation on the desire to kill and the memory of trauma.
- Room 96, René Gonzalez
- Duration: 1h
A duo of dancers with a background in Krump, together with a hip-hop and soul musician of African descent, explore Black masculinity through dance and music. When the necessary examination of contemporary masculinity converges with a need to find one’s place in the face of racism or inequality, living and identifying as a man becomes anything but straightforward. Instead of resorting to blame, the choreographer and Krump champion Mamu Tshi transforms the stage into a space for sharing and self-expression, deftly navigating between vulnerability and resilience. She draws on urban music and the African-American imagination to offer a space for reinvention and healing, a “refuge where pain becomes poetry, and where wounds become stories”.
- 20h
- Room 64, Charles Apothéloz
- Duration: 1h15
The iconoclastic multi-instrumentalist Erika Stucky, whose music merges yodelling, blues and jazz, revisits four decades of concerts across five continents with an original concert-performance, presented for the first time at Vidy. Celebrating the publication of a mammoth book of her photographs — exhibited in September at Images Vevey — she will share her memories of being on the road and backstage, synchronising them with songs, stories and anecdotes from her life. Part “story-singing”, part “song-telling”, this concert-performance will be accompanied by Lucas Niggli, Oli Hartung as well as a special guest, the singer Brandy Butler.
- Room 17, Le Pavillon
- Duration: 1h30
- Language: Spanish
Anacarsis Ramos invites his mother onto the stage. He left his hometown of Campeche, in southern Mexico, to be able to study theatre and live his homosexuality openly. She has held down some forty jobs with disarming courage. The show is a multifaceted, tender and funny account of their relationship – marked by a lack of money, an all-constraining economy, and the need to adapt to, and perform, a certain kind of life. With a biting irony which plays on the empathy of the European gaze, the mother-son duo patch things up and paint a frank and honest picture of poverty, the difficulty of understanding one another, and the joy of sharing.
- Room 76, La Passerelle
- Duration: 1h15
Convergence lines. Valérian Guillaume crossed paths with Martial Richoz, a Lausanne resident known as the “bus-man”, who used to criss-cross the city in vehicles of his own invention, following his own timetables and routes. He was eventually admitted to the psychiatric hospital in Cery, sparking a rich debate on the city’s approach to welcoming and supporting those who are different – the very city that houses a pioneering Art Brut collection. But this is not a biography of Martial Richoz by Valérian Guillaume. As a self-described “neuro-atypical”, the latter instead draws on the bus-man’s dreams, struggles and inventiveness to chart his own unconventional paths through the nets of normative normality. The project was devised for the actor Simon Jacquard, who lives with a rare orphan disease and possesses a unique, musical stage presence, and is being presented at Vidy to mark the 50th anniversary of the Collection de l’Art Brut.
- Room 17, Le Pavillon
Step into a room with wooden beams and a bark floor, take off your shoes and lie down in one of the little beds. It doesn’t matter whether you’re young or old; let yourself be guided by the storyteller’s voice, who, as you drift off to sleep, will read to you the story of Hop-o’-My-Thumb… Do you remember the darkness of the forest? The ogre’s mistake?… An astonishing journey begins. Created over 30 years ago, this masterful and wonderfully simple production bears witness to the Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s — now simply Societas — mastery of theatrical artistry. Chiara Guidi’s stage direction evokes the atmosphere of childhood, when language was still a gateway to the unknown and human speech mingled with that of animals, ogres and other gnomes…
- Room 64, Charles Apothéloz
- Duration: 50’
Performed on stage by the Eklekto ensemble, the score guides five dancers, six percussionists and forty-eight instruments to conjure up galaxies, waves and whirlwinds – and to slip into the apparent complexity of a sky or landscape spanning states of chaos and balance. For Cindy Van Acker, these choreographic scores presented to the dancers have long been a means of challenging the expected and familiar body, and of allowing movement to rediscover itself in space and sound. This time, the dance is animated by a major work for percussion by Iannis Xenakis, an immersive piece with multiple rhythms and resonances.
- Room 64, Charles Apothéloz
- Duration: 1h45
The 600th! To celebrate over 600 performances of Phèdre!, which began as a classroom production commissioned from François Gremaud five seasons ago and has since taken actor Romain Daroles to many of the most important French-speaking stages, this lively monologue—entirely dedicated to the joys of theatre—is being revived for two nights. Phèdre! shares the wonders of Racine’s alexandrine verse and the infinite depths of tragedy with a rare sense of complicity. Like the classical heroine, the stiff-necked lecturer Romain Daroles is swept away by his fervent emotion, as his words express the irrepressible passion of both the tragic lover and the theatre actor.
- Room 23, Salle de répétition
Croire aux masques invites a small group of audience members to enter an exhibition space. Fifty masks have been designed for this performance, and each one is intended for a single spectator. Faced with the objects on display, art, history and culture mingle dizzyingly. There is no ancient art, only fresh perspectives, this curious situation seems to suggest. But what do these gazes do? Should we believe the masks, or that which we cannot see? Romeo Castellucci, a theatre and opera director, also creates performances — like satellites orbiting his theatrical work — which, in spite of their apparent simplicity, disconcertingly and enigmatically explore our expectations of art and our capacity to see beyond forms.
- Room 64, Charles Apothéloz
Faust, now an old man, dreams only of power and possessions. In Faust II, Goethe, that “forerunner of modernity”, made him the archetype of a man consumed by a thirst for domination in a society that has lost its moral compass and its access to beauty. Romeo Castellucci does not simply illustrate Goethe. Here, Faust becomes a kind of bacterium immersed in contemporary society, as the theatre watches him grow. What is this desire for power, this will to control, this unconscious drive to exploit that betrays us? Romeo Castellucci’s iconoclastic and unsettling theatre, with music by Scott Gibbons, confronts the paradoxes and enigmas of our confused world with striking stage images.
- Room 17, Le Pavillon
- Duration: 1h20
“She dies, my Lord!” is the final line of Phaedra, the tragedy by Racine. In a strange twist of fate, this line will bring together the lives of Natacha, an actress playing Phaedra on tour, and Max, a solitary outsider at a loose end. Their lives are polar opposites, and yet their respective lonelinesses echo one another… L’Affaire L.ex.π.Re is a unique cinematic and theatrical experience with live music and sound effects: whilst one half of the audience follows a tragic day in Natacha’s life, the other sees Max receiving a strange parcel. The perspectives then switch, but the music and sound effects remain the same… And so begins a dizzying narrative treasure hunt with whodunit undertones… Don’t forget, reality doesn’t exist — it’s all a matter of perspective…
- Room 76, La Passerelle
- Duration: 1h10
Jonathan Dumani, also known as the rapper and poet AbSTRAL compost, travelled to Latin America on a quest for his buried family roots. In a book published by Éditions La Veilleuse in 2024, he mapped out the reverse America he discovered through a series of encounters and detours. This hybrid text oscillates between a coming-of-age novel and a hallucinatory inner monologue, carried by a lively, syncopated literary flow. That book has now been adapted into a show performed by the author himself: a living journey through memories of exile, self-discovery and worlds of possibilities.
- Room 64, Charles Apothéloz
- Duration: 1h15
Choreographer Mathilde Monnier transforms Lucie Antunes’ concert into a trance-like experience with six female dancers. A drummer and percussionist trained in both classical and contemporary styles, Lucie Antunes is a pioneer of new sonic horizons. Her music explores the rhythms and physicality of sound, and their combined ability to captivate the mind and reach new forms of perception. Mathilde Monnier merges dance with music, moving between meditative slowness and frenzy, accelerations and descents, inspired by the rhythms of nature and the body…
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