La Plage – EN

Welcome to La Plage

La Plage will always be there as a playground for those who can and those who can’t, for the fairest of them all and those who think they are, for carefree nature lovers and for lovers in general, and for loners too, be they sun-kissed or moonstruck. The Grand Théâtre’s La Plage is still not made of sand but it’s so easy to access that sometimes we have trouble closing the gates. What’s the point anyway, it feels so good when things are moving around…

We call it La Plage : The Beach
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La Plage is where you look at the sea, La Plage is where you close your eyes. Where it’s warm and you feel a breeze on your skin. And your skin shivers from that unexpected touch.
Not that it’s unpleasant, mind you. Somewhere you can let yourself go and forget about time.
 
La Plage is when you say why not? Why not me? Why not them? Why not us? Why not another way? Maybe just once? And who knows? She loves me, she loves me not.
 
La Plage is like taking a bath, a breath of fresh air, doing something crazy, something that can mean something else.
There will be golden times, sunset times, full moon times and little blue or grey times. There will be colder times, times to huddle together. That’s also what happens at La Plage, it’s where you learn to live together, one with another, sometimes more on your own because you need space to think, sometimes noticing what other people are saying, their attitudes, new trends or gossip, keeping up with the times and seizing the day. La Plage is the echo of the city. So take your kit off and plunge into the talk of the town.

There’s bound to be a beach hut that suits you:
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Late Nights, or how to go the opera and forget to go home; Apéropéra or everything you always wanted to know about Wagner but were afraid to ask Verdi, a slice of life taken from our productions and served with a hefty portion of casual good humour; Grand Brunch, or how to unwind at the end of the week under the gilt and the chandeliers of the opera; En coulisse, or “In the wings”, for the enquiring minds who want to know, those that watch the “Making of” and spot the continuity editing mistakes — look, before he had a jacket, now he doesn’t — yeah, it’s called an ellipsis and we explain it all in our Intropéras. And please feel free to pay us a visit, literally or figuratively: we’re standing at the ready, with guides to take you through the underground mazes of the Grand Théâtre, or a charming barista serving you a flat white with our Wi-Fi access code. If you won’t come to the beach, then La Plage will come to you.

So, where is La Plage anyway?
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Outdoors, behind a screen or in your neighbourhood community hall, in partnership with your favorite museum or in your school, La Plage can be found almost anywhere, depending on the mood: it can be inside the Grand Théâtre or outside, it can be urban and cosmopolitan or existential and tormented. After all, life’s a beach…
 
So have you found your spot on our beach yet? With our Public Workshops one saturday morning on each production, this is your chance to hop on board and try your hand at being a scenographer, a dancer, a director, a librettist or, who knows, maybe even a critic?

2023-2024

2023-2024 Season

La Plage: five original shows, a host of activities, collaborations and partnerships, educational programmes for schools and organizations and bespoke projects for all those who want to come ashore and allow us to make some space for them at the beach.

The productions

The productions

A musical entertainment of arias by Donizetti repurposed in French.

Rosa and Bianca are twin princesses with completely opposed characters. When Rosa runs, shouts and is generally quite loud, Bianca dreams, reads and sighs.

La Souris Traviata
For children from 3 to 6 years
1- 4 Nov 2023
For those who have not yet seen La Souris Traviata, a few catch-up sessions.

Did you know that at night there is a mouse in the Foyer of the Grand Théâtre who dreams of becoming a singer?

Hush
From 6 years old
27-28 Jan 2024
Henry’s Dream Machine

Hush, hush, shush, shush! Listen carefully and open your eyes to discover Henry’s extraordinary dream machine. Henry who? Henry Purcell

Outsider
Choreography by Rachid Ouramdane
3- 5 May 2024
World premiere with the Ballet du Grand Théâtre

La Plage’s first foray into dance will be with the Geneva Ballet Company, but not only!

Before, after

Activities before, after and about the performances

Intropéras
45 minutes before the bells call you into the house, it’s time to refresh your memory and go back to the beginnings of the opera.
En coulisse
Haven’t you ever wondered what it’s like on the other side, when the curtain falls on a performance?
Apéropéras
Apéropéra is a relaxed, fresh and unstuffy way to (re)discover a composer, a work, a topic.
Public Workshops
With every Grand Théâtre production this season, there will be a Saturday morning of creative workshops related to the upcoming opera or ballet.
About

Activities about the performances and the GTG

Éclairages
The opera and choreographic creations of the 2021-2022 season will be the subject of a very comprehensive conference on the work.
Late Nights
When the opera house becomes a performance and you are the performers.
Cinéopéra
Four personalities, four careers, four films that will reflect exceptional artistic careers and our productions.
María de Buenos Aires under the stars
Kick off your shoes and spend an evening in the park, with your toes in the grass and Verdi’s music in your ears.
GTG

Activities – About the GTG

Apérovisite
The Apérovisite: a hybrid between the traditional Guided Tour and the Apéropéra.
Open doors day
With the kids or just wander in, the doors are wide open.
Grand Brunch
We have a Sunday buffet ready to satisfy the hungriest opera and ballet buffs!
The Guided Tour
A journey into the secret and slightly offbeat world of Geneva’s grand opera house.
GTJ

Grand Théâtre Jeunesse

Atelier pédagogique sur Faust à l'atelier peinture de Verntissa, Genève.
Listen, see, experience and feel…
Discover the activities for students and teachers offered by our cultural mediation team.
Out and about

Out and about with the Grand Théâtre

Partners, partnerships, twinning, collaborations, co-programming, alliances, parallels, concordances, synergies, all these words basically mean one thing: don’t stay in your corner, go out and meet the other person, your neighbour, your friend, your sister, the guy you meet at the bus stop every day. Outside the walls, within our walls, walled in, in ruins, under construction, down and out, everything is good for knocking down over-conceived, over- learned or hand-me-down ideas. Come and see for yourself, come and practice the art of taking a step back to observe the world. Like every season, we offer you a few options for adventurous encounters…
 
Contact: [email protected]

With organizations
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If you work in a civil society organization or a structure linked to disability or to the integration of asylum seekers and you want to introduce opera and ballet to your participants or beneficiaries, feel free to contact us. We can build a project suited to your purpose that takes into account your needs and our availability.

In partnership with several Genevan institutions
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Our “Power Games” this season will naturally be played out in our productions but will also feature in many joint and special projects and events. With our partners the Orchestre de la Suisse romande and the Orchestre de chambre de Genève of course, but also with Antigel, the Bains des Pâquis, La Bâtie-Festival de Genève, the Cinémas du Grütli, Les Créatives, La Comédie, the Geneva Camerata, Electron Festival, the Théâtre de Vidy or even Vernier-Culture. The more the merrier!

Focus

Focus

The Grand Théâtre de Genève invites you to continue the season with our partners in Geneva and the French-speaking cultural scene in Switzerland. Here are some performances at Vidy in Lausanne and at the Comédie in Geneva that echo our season.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
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In the bitter cold of a Polish winter, men are dying in strange circumstances. Janina, a delightfully eccentric pensioner with a passion for astrology and poetry, leads the investigation. She soon suspects that the animals in the forest are planning their revenge. Has Nature decided to take up arms? Simon McBurney adapts Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, a sharp and inventive thriller by Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature, for the stage. The celebrated British actor and director brings his creative genius and technophile verve to bear on a story, language and subject matter that are as contemporary as it gets.
 
Theatre by Simon McBurney
From October 11 to 21, 2023
Comédie de Genève

 
In partnership with
 

Extra Life
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The end of night. After a party, a sister and brother meet again. Their fusional bond, against a background of domestic violence, was brutally torn apart by a tragedy 20 years earlier. EXTRA LIFE deconstructs the sensory experience of this moment through dissociation games that meticulously articulate music, space, light, choreography and acting.
An architect of feelings, Gisèle Vienne likes to unfold them to better diffract their multiple facets. And then the pure density of the moment emerges from the stage.
 
Theatre by Gisèle Vienne
From February 21 to 24, 2024
As part of Festival Antigel
Comédie de Genève

 
In partnership with
 

Le Jardin des délices
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Le Jardin des Délices is a dialogue with five hundred years ago when Hieronymus Bosch was painting his Garden of Earthly Delights, a masterpiece of art history with infinite interpretations. Obie Award-winning French director Philippe Quesne’s Le Jardin des Délices is the many-layered picaresque narrative of a group of humans gathered in a place obviously removed from the world and who busy themselves producing, literally and cinematographically, their utopia: a free life, without separation, without distinction, in which beings and species live together in perfect harmony. As in the late Middle Ages, this fable is situated in a period of transition, as narratives and know-hows are shifting.
 
Theatre by Philippe Quesne
From September 26 to October 4, 2023
Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne

 
In partnership with
 

Antigone in the Amazon
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For Antigone in the Amazon, Milo Rau and his team traveled to the Brazilian state of Pará, where the forests are burning due to expanding soy monocultures and where nature is being devoured by capitalism. On an occupied piece of land, in collaboration with MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra), the world’s largest landless workers’ movement, they create an allegorical play about the violent devastations and displacements caused by the modern state, which places private property above the traditional right to land.
 
Theatre by Milo Rau
From June 19 to 22, 2024
Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne

 
In partnership with
 

Collaboration

Collaborations

Les Aubes Musicales
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After the success of Julien et Jean-Paul’s animalistic expeditions, and the equally great success of Shostakovich’s pizzicati interspersed with elegies and D-string races, the Grand Théâtre will lay down its beach towels and sport its swimming trunks at Bains des Pâquis to expose the corridors of power and celebrate the power of music.
 
Ena Pongrac mezzo-soprano
Jean-Paul Pruna piano
 
August 9, 2023 at 6AM
Bains des Pâquis

 
In partnership with

Kali Malone
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Sacred Drones. The new minimalist muse, an American musician in Stockholm, offers us a concert on the great organ of the Geneva cathedral of Saint-Pierre. Her music is full of harmonic textures that brood in repetitive movements and extended durations; it emits emotional colours with stunning depths of field. You can get ready for the event by listening to with début LP The Sacrificial Code (2019) for this never seen or heard experience: Bâtie joining forces with the Grand Théâtre at the Cathedral.
 
September 3, 2023 at 7PM
As part of La Bâtie – Festival de Genève
Cathédrale Saint-Pierre

 
In partnership with
 

 

Cinéopéras
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The truth is we aren’t too fond of seeing opera at the movies. We’d rather have it live on stage in all its vibrating emotional loudness. But at the opera, we do like a good movie. In fact, we’re just as keen to watch one as our neighbours at the Cinémas du Grütli, Geneva’s art house cinema. So we developed this new format, Cinéopéra, as both a tribute to and a discovery of the silver screen, where four opera and ballet greats who will be on stage with us this season choose their favorite film to view and discuss. Four very different artists, all exceptional, using film to zoom in (or out) on the productions they designed for us, in an amusing play of intertextuality and inter-referentiality. And perhaps one day, it’ll be hard to tell whether you’re at the opera or at the movies…
 
Daniele Finzi Pasca
October 21, 2023 — 6PM
Lost in La Mancha,
Keith Fulton & Louis Pepe, 93 min, 2002
 
Christoph Waltz
December 2, 2023 — 6PM
Sweet Smell of Success,
Alexander Mackendrick, 96 min, 1957
 
Leonardo García Alarcón
February 10, 2024 — 6PM
Prova d’orchestra,
Federico Fellini, 70 min, 1978
 
Adel Abdessemed
April 6, 2024 — 3PM
Le Grand Jeu,
Jacques Feyder, 110 min, 1934
 
Les Cinémas du Grütli
 

2023-2024

2023-2024 Season

Programme
Opera, ballet, La Plage, … Find the complete programme of the new season.
Power Games
Introduction, artist interviews, explanations… everything you need to know and understand about the new GTG programme.

#WeArtGTG

The entire GTG universe. Here, there, everywhere.

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Illustrations
© GTG / Joëlle Flumet