Montblanc Awards Winner of Young Directors Project at Salzburg Festival

Ingrid Roosen-Trinks, Montblanc Cultural Foundation director, Peter Kuemmel, culture critic, Jury, Gis le Vienne, Young Director, Winner 2012, Norbert Platt, chairman of the Board of Directors Montblanc Simplo GmbH, Helga Rabl-Stadler, president of Salzburg Festival, Sven-Eric Bechtolf, director of Drama Salzburg Festival, Montblanc, Young Directors Award 2012 ©wildbild

You may have remember earlier this month I wrote about the Montblanc Young Directors Project, where the luxury brand sponsors a competition for up-and-coming directors and their ensembles, held during the Salzburg Festival. The project recently has announced a winner,  Gisèle Vienne, who created two pieces for the festival: Eternelle Idole and This Is How You Will Disappear.

Montblanc and Sven-Eric Bechtolf, director of Drama of the Salzburg Festival, invited three directors and their ensembles from around the world, selected by a jury, to present their productions at the annual festival in Salzburg, Austria. Montblanc covered all costs of bringing the groups to Salzburg as well as the awards and prize money.

As winner of the Young Director winner, the French artist receives 10,000 euros ($12,180) in prize money and the Montblanc limited edition Hommage à Max Reinhardt fountain pen, designed exclusively for the event. The sale of the writing instrument provided additional funds that were used to present a fifth production, the guest appearance of Hamlet Cantabile by the South Korean performance group TUIDA.

The statement from the jury about Vienne’s winning performances, reads:

In her pieces Eternelle Idole and even more so in This Is How You Will Disappear, Gisèle Vienne does not evoke a time that we once knew, nor one that will ever exist. This director travels through her own universe, and it is very clearly a world of posterity: the dammed, the exiled, the undead of our popular culture tread their paths there; it is impossible to make contact because language has reached the end of its tether. In Vienne’s theatre, man is devoured by the spaces he thought he controlled. However, the manner in which he struggles and ultimately disappears is marked by great beauty. This beauty has convinced the jury to award this year’s Montblanc Young Directors Award to Gisèle Vienne.

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