« Reformulating mysteries, that’s the heart of my work »
Yves Lenoir – Author, Librettist and Stage Director
Yves Lenoir came to the theatre through the stage, first as an actor, then as a countertenor, and to literature through Clermont-Ferrand, where he studied it. For twenty-five years he has been writing and directing, and the two have never parted ways.
The stage came first. As associate artist of the Atelier du Rhin, the National Drama Centre of Alsace, he led its reading committee and championed contemporary writing, before directing three theatre productions co-produced by French national stages and drama centres, performed as far as the Festival d’Avignon. Opera then became his main territory: six productions, from Monteverdi to Janáček, from Bellini to Verdi, at the Opéra de Dijon and at Theater Orchester Biel Solothurn, including a production of I Capuleti e i Montecchi given eighteen times in six cities; and seven years as artistic collaborator of the Opéra national de Paris, coordinating some forty productions alongside directors such as Bob Wilson, Patrice Chéreau, Romeo Castellucci, Ivo van Hove and Calixto Bieito, in Europe’s leading houses, from La Scala to the Teatro Real.
Writing, meanwhile, has always run beneath the stage. Two published books, Leçons de ténèbres (2006) and Une vie immobile (2013). Two works created for music, by degrees: an original libretto, Le Petit Bossu, commissioned by the Atelier du Rhin for Les Percussions de Strasbourg, with music by James Wood; then a dramaturgy composed from the poems of Philippe Jaccottet, set to music by Patricia Dallio, Dans la nuit la plus claire jamais rêvée. And today, a cycle: Qu’est-ce qu’on fait de ces hommes-là ? (What Do We Do with Men Like These?), an opera serial in three seasons, which takes up the male protagonists of Carmen, Pelléas et Mélisande and Dialogues des Carmélites at the very moment their operas abandon them.
In February 2027 he directs a gala at the Palais Garnier for the Opéra national de Paris, and writes its narrative. And because the closed rooms of his cycle are places where he regularly sits, he teaches French to asylum seekers, reads aloud in care homes and visits prison inmates. He works in French, English, German, Italian and Spanish.