Gisèle Vienne, Dennis Cooper & Puppentheater Halle
The Ventriloquists Convention

About the Artists

Gisèle Vienne is an artist, director, and choreographer based in Paris. Her background is varied and diverse: she was trained as a musician, earned a degree in philosophy, and went on to the foremost school for puppetry, Ecole Supérieure Nationale des Arts de la Marionnette. She then worked with dancers, developing her choreographic practice at the studios of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker/Rosas. She works regularly with the writers Dennis Cooper and Catherine Robbe-Grillet, the musicians Peter Rehberg and Stephen O'Malley of drone metal band Sunn O))), and actor Jonathan Capdevielle. For more information, visit.

“Every book by Cooper is seemingly a matter of life and death, a tightrope act performed without a safety net.” —The Guardian

Dennis Cooper is an American novelist, poet, and critic based in Paris and Los Angeles. Regarded as a master of transgressive literature, he is known for his minute observations of human relations and obsessions. He has published nine novels, most recently The Marbled Swarm. He is also a contributing editor of Artforum and the editor of the American publishing imprint Little House on the Bowery. He wrote the texts for Gisèle Vienne's The Pyre(2013), LAST SPRING: A Prequel(2011), This is how you will disappear(2010), Jerk(2008), Kindertotenlieder(2007), Une belle enfant blonde(2005), and I Apologize(2004). For more information, visit.

The Puppentheater Halle is a group of eight puppeteers based in Halle, a city in the former East Germany known for its puppet theater. Trained at the theater school “Ernst Busch” in Berlin, they are also directors, teachers, or puppet makers. The company was created in 1954, and in 1995 Christoph Werner brought a new dynamic by developing a new style that foregrounds a permanent relation between theater and puppet. Starting from a piece of literature or an idea, the shows develop through improvisation. The Puppentheater Halle works on four to six shows per season. Each of them is focused on a specific theme and is often a coproduction with other theaters or festivals, such as the Wiener Festwochen, Schauspielhaus-Köln, Staatstheater-Stuttgart or Volksbühne-Berlin. The Puppentheater Halle is interdisciplinary and has been inspired in part by collaborations with other artists, including Joël Pommerat and Nico & the Navigator.

KTL is the musical duo of Stephen O'Malley (Sunn O)))) and Peter Rehberg (Pita), originally formed to create the music for the theater production titled Kindertotenlieder by Gisèle Vienne and Dennis Cooper. KTL is an experimental dark ambient music project that bridges the sonic gap between the black metal music and extreme computer music the two are respectively known for. Outside of KTL, Stephen and Peter each have active careers; Stephen is best known for his work in the Seattle band Sunn O))))—which merges diverse genres of drone, ambient, noise, and extreme metal—as well as for numerous collaborations with other musicians. Peter is known for his electronic audio works, as Pita, and for heading up the Vienna-based label experimental music label Editions Mego. Stephen O'Malley was born in the United States and lives in Paris; Peter Rehberg was born in the United Kingdom and lives in Vienna.