Éric Vigner


Éric Vigner is a French stage director, actor and scenic designer. He is directing the CDDB-Théâtre de Lorient, Centre Dramatique National from 1996 to 2015.

Biography

Éric Vigner graduated from the University of Brittany, France, in the visual arts. He then studied in Paris, at the National School of theatre art and techniques and at the National Drama Academy CNSAD. His consecutive qualifications naturally led towards directorship.
In 1990 he founded his own theater company SUZANNE M. Éric Vigner. In 1996 he was appointed by the Minister of Culture to direct Brittany's Drama Centre, henceforth called the CDDB-Théâtre de Lorient. Since 1996 the graphic artists M/M Paris are in charge of the CDDB's visual communication. Besides Vigner's commitment to contemporary playwrights such as Marguerite Duras and Roland Dubillard, for which he was awarded the honour of Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1998, Vigner developed a new approach to the French classics - Racine's Bajazet, Corneille's L’Illusion Comique, Victor Hugo's Marion De Lorme, Molière's L’École des femmes and Le Bourgeois gentilhomme and Shakeapeare's Othello.
In October 2010, Vigner founded his international theater Academy. The Academy follows the principles of a little democracy and assembles seven young trilingual actors from seven cultural backgrounds - Morocco, Romania, Mali, Belgium, South Korea, Germany, Israel. They work on classical as well as contemporary forms of writing and present La Place Royale by Corneille, Guantanamo by Frank Smith and La Faculté by Christophe Honoré.
He has chosen a course as a pioneer, an "’inter-lingual" navigator, building on dramatic art as common ground. He developed international collaborations to last over the years, searching for a genuine mutual cultural transmission. He directed in different languages and cultural backgrounds: at the National Theater of Korea in Seoul, The Bourgeois Gentleman by Molière and Jean-Baptiste Lully ; twice at the National Theater of Albania, Tirana, 2007,The Barber of Seville by Beaumarchais, and 2016, Lucrezia Borgia by Victor Hugo ; at 7 Stages Theater, Atlanta, 2008, In the Solitude of Cotton Fields by Bernard-Marie Koltès ; in India, Gates to India Song based on The Vice Consul and India Song by Marguerite Duras ; at the Odeon Theatre in Bucharest, 2016, during Romania's campaign for Unesco's approval of The Wisdom of the Earth sculpture by Constantin Brancusi, he staged the famous trial from 1928 - Brancusi versus the United States.

Actor


"The theater which I am interested in develops a form for the spectator to project himself into, to reinvent himself. For me, theater is not a place to come to in order to get answers, but a place where it is possible to revisit stories, our ones, the intimate, forgotten ones - in fact an unfamiliar place into which the spectator can enter. Theater needs to carry in itself its counterpart, its paradox : "to be or not to be", to be one thing and at the same time something else. For example, when Cézanne paints apples and says "It is with an apple that I want to amaze Paris", his subject is not the apple. His subject is painting. The same goes for theater. It is not the story we are actually attached to, but the theater itself."

Éric Vigner