Duration: c.75 minutes Music & Text: Jennifer Walshe & Philip Venables Commissioned by Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in association with Festival Musica Produced by Festival Musica Strasbourg.
Co-Production Partners: Deutsche Oper Berlin, BOZAR Bruxelles, Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ Amsterdam, Ultima Oslo, New Music Dublin, Music Biennale Zagreb, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities Oxford, with the support of the Irish Cultural Centre.
The Alonetimes has just been announced — a brand new collaboration with Jennifer Walshe and the Fondation Cartier. The Alonetimes is a staged piece that will be the first theatrical performance in the enormous new Fondation Cartier building in Paris, right opposite the Louvre. The project will premiere there on 16th April 2026, with further performances on 17th and 18th April. It is produced by Musica Festival and the Fondation Cartier, and will then go on tour in Autumn 2026, with dates and venues to be announced.
The description of the project so far, from the press release:
The Alonetimes is a fragmented archaeology of personal stories from the past. Six multi-skilled performers operate across a mash-up of places and times, slipping in and out of different voices, different lives. They tell us stories, the sort of stories we carry around like pebbles in our pockets, stories we need to tell each other in order to resolve them, in order to finally set them down and move forward, in order not to be trapped between different periods of time.
By turns deeply moving and darkly comic, the piece weaves together semi-autobiographical stories of broken friendships, fumbled virginity losses, quiet moments of revelation with a stranger at a hotel bar, emotional meltdowns during a forest bathing session. As we thread our way through this kaleidoscopic minefield of memories, audience and performers together, we will work through our shit from the past, put it to rest, and maybe feel a bit less alone.