Stéphanie Lupo works as a director, actress, performer, dramaturg, teacher, researcher, and author. After training in Dance and Aesthetics and Art Sciences, she studied Drama, Stage Directing, and Dramaturgy at ENSATT in France and at the Moscow Drama Theater with Russian director Anatoli Vassiliev. For nearly ten years, she studied and practiced with him in the spirit of laboratory theater, the foundations of the art of the living, creative, free, and authentic process of the actor and performer. She simultaneously learned the laws of acting, directing, and dramaturgy. She was introduced to a rigorous working method and a high conception of art directly inherited from the great principles of the Moscow Art Theater. This work made her aware of the notion of commitment, of "working on oneself" and of the "act of the actor", while she defended a doctoral thesis under the direction of Georges Banu at the Sorbonne University in Paris, entitled "The sense and meaning of life in art" and while she developed research and creation work around the world of performance and the performative.

 

As a performer she also trained with Natalia Svereva (Gitis Moscow), Thomas Ostermeier and Meredith Monk. She has worked internationally, notably with the Russian director Anatoli Vassiliev, with the French playwright Alexandra Badea, French director Yves-Noel Genod, with the Polish director Krzysztof Garbaczewski, the Belgian choreographer Chantal Ysermans (Troublein Jan Fabre), the performance artist Fiorenza Menini and within her own productions or performances.

 

In stage directing, she continued her training in Poland with the director Krzysztof Warlikowski, whom she assisted on a creation around Shakespeare, while she developed a practice between dance, theater and performance often based on her own writings. She staged texts by Henri Miller, Oscar Wilde, Heiner Muller, Julian Beck, Marguerite Duras, Lalla Dev, Falk Richter, Alejandro Jodorowski and several dramaturgical combinations around texts of a philosophical or poetic nature - Plato, Nietzsche, M. Houellbeck.

 

She is the author of several works (essay and performative drama). Her book about the artistic and educational work of Anatoli Vassiliev, At the Heart of Theater Pedagogy, Rigor and Anarchy, won the Georges Jamati Prize (Best Work of Theater Aesthetics of the Year), while her work I Want to Talk About Falling Youth (l’Arche publisher), which she staged at the Grutli in Geneva, at the Grotowski Institute in Poland and in various festivals in Paris, was one of the texts in the competition for the TNS actor course in Strasbourg.

 

She regularly teaches in professional high schools for actors and performers in Switzerland, France and Belgium (Accademia Teatro Dimitri, ENSATT, Ecole du TNB, Ecole du Louvre, Ecole supérieure des arts de La Cambre...), in preparatory schools for theatre schools in Switzerland and France (Conservatoire d’art dramatique de Genève - Cursus pré professionnel-, MC93, EDT91, Act) and in masters in Theatre or Performing Arts at university (in Ticino (CH), Metz, Besançon, Montpellier, Nice (Fr)) and in various professional training places (Superstrat, Hostellerie de Pontempérat. ...). Since 2024 she has also given a series of masterclasses on the foundations of the Russian school of actors in terms of directing performers and dramaturgical analysis for acting, intended for the teachers of the acting school Cours Florent in France.

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At the Accademia Teatro Dimitri in Ticino, she has created and directed for several years a bold and pioneering CAS in Theatre, Performance and Contemporary Live Arts, where she gave theoretical and practical courses, and where she accompanied around forty projects of creation of solo performances in connection with the Festival Territori (Bellinzona Theatre in Ticino). Within this school, she was also invited to lead a research project on the origins of performance, the body on stage and the notion of « performative », the impact of this entry of the body into art, in the development of a multidisciplinary language of the performing arts from the 1950s and the development of a type of dramaturgy called « performative » and « post-dramatic ».

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She also conducted researches, wrote papers and gave public talks on the history and philosophy of Happenings, Events, on Fluxus, Gutai, feminist artists pioneers in performance art, the influence of Guy Debord in arts,  also on the works of Julian Beck through the Living theater, on Nikki de St Phalle, Valie export, Pina Bausch, Anna Halprin, Alejandro Jodorowski, Marina Abramovic and the heritage of C. Stanislavsky and the russian tradition school of acting and directing through the works of Anatoli Vassiliev, Jersy Grotowsky, Krystian Lupa and Krzysztof Warlikowski…

 

Since 2012, she has lived and worked between Switzerland and France. In 2018, she joined the company Association The Theater of Consciousness in Geneva, where she is the artistic director. She regularly offers international workshops/courses and creative research laboratories designed as powerful journeys through the art of stage creation, and collaborates within several structures and companies in Switzerland and France as a performer, dramaturg, external viewer, or associate director.

 

Through her creations, her research, her writings and a rich work of transmission, she offers a stage art that combines theater, dance and performance, around the notions of creative performer and true living process on stage, in the line of an art as a vehicle, of consciousness and transformation. Her stage work is oriented towards the singular creativity of each individual and aims to raise awareness of an equally performative, plastic and engaging aspect of the body and space. She is interested in living art as a place of authentic communication and evolution, committed to celebrating the presence and power of Creation and the Living.