Mnouchkine, Ariane (b. 1939)

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MNOUCHKINE, ARIANE (b. 1939)

French theater director and founder of the Théâtre de Soleil.

Ariane Mnouchkine was born in Paris in 1939 of a Russian father and English mother. Her career has been synonymous with the work of the outstanding modern French theater company Théâtre de Soleil, of which she is the founder and continuing artistic director. In 1959, while still a student at the Sorbonne, she formed with a group of fellow students a theater group that developed, in 1964, into the Soleil. Operating from the beginning as a collective, the group has continued to make decisions by majority vote, although Mnouchkine has always provided its central artistic vision. She has always been dedicated to the goal of popular theater and to the exploration of significant contemporary social and political concerns through highly theatrical productions drawing upon a very wide range of international performance sources, including commedia dell'arte, circus, and various Asian forms.

The company's first major success came in 1967 with Arnold Wesker's The Kitchen, which later, in the wake of the political upheavals in May 1968, toured to strikers in occupied factories. For both political and aesthetic reasons the Soleil then turned from the staging of literary texts toward "collective creations," building texts and performances out of the combined input and experience of the company. Their first such experiment was The Clowns in 1969, in which each company member developed his or her own personal "clown," reflecting their relationship with contemporary society.

In 1970 the company moved to their permanent quarters, the Cartoucherie, a former munitions storage center on the east edge of Paris. They divided the vast interior space of the Cartoucherie into two spaces, a large black-box theater and an adjoining immense lobby. In these spaces Mnouchkine and her company developed their unique performance aesthetic. Audiences gathered in the lobby before performances, often greeted by Mnouchkine herself, and could partake before or during the production of specially prepared food in some way connected with the current production. The entire lobby space would also be decorated to reflect the production, with books, maps, and charts to further immerse the spectator in that world. Inside the performance space actors were not hidden away but could be seen preparing for the production.

The opening productions at the Cartoucherie, 1789 (1970) and 1793 (1972) were among the most famous in the modern French theater. A number of individual platforms, some connected by walkways, others only by stairs from the floor, were scattered about the open space, and audience members were free to move about, surrounded by and sometimes engulfed by the events of the French Revolution. These productions placed Mnouchkine and her company at the forefront of modern French theatrical performance. Their next production, L'age d'or (1975; The golden age) moved their political concerns to contemporary France, dealing with the exploitation of immigrant laborers. Mephisto (1979), adapted by Mnouchkine from the novel by Klaus Mann, dealt with the problem of a theater artist's responsibility under a totalitarian regime.

This return to the literary text continued with one of Mnouchkine's most ambitious projects, a staging of three Shakespeare plays, Richard II, Twelfth Night, and Henry IV, Part 1 (1982) in her own translations and utilizing costume and acting techniques from Asian traditions—Noh, Kabuki, and Kathakali. The dazzling resulting productions toured widely and established Mnouchkine's international reputation. The composer Jean-Jacques Lemêtre created musical accompaniment on instruments from around the world, and his work subsequently became an integral part of the ongoing Soleil aesthetic.

In 1984 Mnouchkine turned her attention to recent history, staging two modern epic dramas written by the feminist author Hélène Cixous: L'histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, roi de Cambodge (1984; The terrible but unfinished history of Norodom Sihanouk, king of Cambodia) and L'indiade ou L'Inde de leursrêves (1986; The Indiade, or the India of their dreams). Then in 1990 Mnouchkine returned again to the classics, with the monumental Les Atrides, a reworking of Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis plus Aeschylus' Oresteia, with great visual spectacle including costumes based on the Indian Kathakali. In 1992 this production toured internationally.

Mnouchkine continued to be passionately devoted to social causes. In 1995 she went on a hunger strike to protest Europe's nonintervention in Bosnia and in 1995 welcomed illegal immigrants into her theater, an experience that inspired her production Et soudain, des nuits d'éveil (1997; And suddenly, sleepless nights). This social concern also grounded the Brechtian-like parable play Tambours sur la digue (2000; Drums on the dike), written by Cixous and staged in a style based upon Japanese Bunraku, and Le dernier caravansérail (2003; The last caravan), dealing with the search for sanctuary by displaced refugees in the contemporary world. In 2005 Mnouchkine received the UNESCO Picasso Medal for her work in the theater.

See alsoBrecht, Bertolt; Cixous, Hélène; Theater.