About this Artist
Cyril Teste was initially interested in the visual arts before turning his head to theater, studying at the École Régionale d’Acteurs de Cannes and the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique. His passion for directing led him to found Collectif MxM in 2000. With painting and theater as his companions, he takes inspiration from the worlds of Viola, Naumann, Wilson, and Castellucci to bring the perspective of an author, visual artist, and videographer to the stage. His film influences are all reformers: Bergman, the French New Wave, Vinterberg, and Cassavetes, who invariably moved from film to theater and revolutionized film production. Cyril Teste uses actors and contemporary scripts to examine the rules of theater by infusing it with visual art and new technologies. He is fascinated by Japan and draws on the nation’s contemplative poetry, its intertwining of real and imaginary worlds, and the phenomena of an archaic yet electronic society.
As a director, he has worked with authors of immediacy, whose writings shatter dramatic conventions and pave the way for visual art, such as Patrick Bouvet (Shot/Direct, Festival d’Avignon, 2004) and Falk Richter (Electronic City and Nobody). He then wrote and directed a diptych on childhood, Reset and Sun (Festival d’Avignon, 2011). In 2013, he directed Tête Haute, his first show for a young audience.
Since 2011, Cyril Teste and Collectif MxM have been working on the concept of film performance; they first established a specific set of rules, before distorting and unraveling them with every new performance: Patio, Park, Nobody, Festen, Opening Night, La Mouette, and Sur l’autre rive. He has directed the operas Hamlet and Fidelio at the Opéra Comique in Paris and Salome at the Vienna State Opera. He has also led many different side projects, readings, short plays, and concert performances. As an educator, Cyril Teste developed the Laboratoire Nomade d’Arts Scéniques, a cross-disciplinary network of cultural transmission that combines a framework for disseminating information with higher education in the dramatic and visual arts and technology.