Crash Park: The life of an island
Crash Park: la vie d'une île
by Philippe Quesne
 
Direction/Stage design: Philippe Quesne
Dramaturgy collaboration: Camille Louis
Animals’ costume design: Corine Petitpierre
Costumes collaboration: Pauline Jakobiak
Video: César Vayssié
Lighting design: Thomas Laigle, Mickaël Nodin
Original Music: Pierre Desprats
Sound design: Samuel Gutman
Technical collaboration: Marc Chevillon, Joachim Fosset
Set construction: Ateliers Nanterre-Amandiers
Assistant director: François-Xavier Rouyer
Executive production: Vivarium 
Production: Nanterre-Amandiers, centre dramatique national
With the original support of: Fondation d’entreprise Hermès / New Settings.
Coproduction: Théâtre National de Bretagne (Rennes), HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Munchner Kammerspiele (Munich), Onassis Cultural Center (Athènes)
 
 
On stage: Isabelle Angotti, Jean-Charles Dumay, Léo Gobin, Yuika Hokama, Sébastien Jacobs, Thérèse Songue, Thomas Suire, Gaëtan Vourc’h

Philippe Quesne 
 
Born in 1970, Philippe Quesne is a French artist, director and stage designer. He studied visual arts, visual design and set design in Paris. In 2003, he founded his company Vivarium Studio as a laboratory for theatrical innovation and collaboration between painters, actors, dancers, musicians, and one dog. The dramaturgy of the performances developed and staged by Philippe Quesne is based on a strong interconnection between space, set and bodies. The sets often become working studios or “vivariums” representing a microcosm.
 
Philippe Quesne hunts the marvelous, the tiny, and pushes to the extreme experiences of our daily lives as well as the relationship between mankind and nature. (Itching of the wings, D'après Nature, L'Effet de Serge, La Mélancolie des Dragons, Big Bang, Swamp Club, etc.). His multidisciplinary performances were shown by numerous international festivals. 2014 until 2020 Philippe Quesne was director curator of the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers in a suburb of Paris, creating e.g. the productions Le Théâtre des négociations (2015) in collaboration with Bruno Latour, La Nuit des taupes (The Night of the Moles, 2016) and Crash Park, la vie d’une île (Crash Park, The Life of an Island, 2018). In addition to his stage work, he develops installations for museums, performances and interventions for public spaces and landscapes. In 2018, he directed his first opera production: Usher based on Edgar Allan Poe, with music by Claude Debussy and Annelies Van Parys, at Staatsoper Under den Linden (Berlin). Since 2019, he has been serving as curator of the French pavilions at the Prague Quadriennial.
 
He created two pieces for the repertory of Münchner Kammerspiele, Caspar Western Friedrich (2016) and Farm Fatale (2019), and for Theater Basel Cosmic Drama (2021).