La Plage – EN

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.

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.

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?

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.

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!

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
 

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 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
 

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
 

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

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
 

 

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