Premiers Actes Festival in Haute-Alsace

A festival of creation in the heart of the Vosges landscapes

Born in 2008 from the initiative of director Thibaut Wenger and a group of young Belgian, German, and French artists, the Festival Premiers Actes is a unique theatrical adventure rooted in the valleys of Haute-Alsace. Every summer, between late August and early September, around sixty young European artists take over unusual locations — farms, industrial wastelands, meadows, lakes, forests — to present theatrical and performative creations conceived in and with the landscape.

Actor's theatre confronted with the landscape

The festival champions actor's and spoken theatre, based on contemporary attempts — sometimes irreverent — to confront the repertoire. Works by Howard Barker, Heiner Müller, Georg Büchner, Koffi Kwahulé, and other major authors are revisited by young companies exploring the limits of scenic language, between dance, visual arts, music, and cinema. The pieces presented are intentionally short and experimental, conceived as artistic research laboratories open to the public.

Uncommon performance venues

One of the hallmarks of the Premiers Actes Festival is the choice of unusual performance venues scattered throughout the valleys of Munster, Saint-Amarin, and Orbey. The Anciens Thermes de Soultzbach-les-Bains, the lake of Schiessrothried, the lake of Kruth, the Petit Ballon de Sondernach, the Wesserling Park and its former textile factories have served as natural backdrops for the performances. The festival also takes over institutional stages: La Filature, a national stage in Mulhouse, and the Comédie de l'Est — a national dramatic center in Colmar — as well as the Espace 110 in Illzach.

The Travaux Publics company

The Premiers Actes Festival is produced by the Travaux Publics company, founded by Thibaut Wenger. Trained at INSAS in Belgium, Wenger has built an artistic career nourished by German-language authors — Büchner, Müller, Kleist — and by a vision of theatre as an art of time and language. The company, based in Mulhouse, develops territorial mediation work alongside the festival in sensitive neighborhoods of the Mulhouse conurbation (Brustlein, Cité-Briand) and in primary schools in the Kaysersberg valley.

A springboard for young European companies

Premiers Actes functions as a springboard for young European theatre companies. The festival gives carte blanche to emerging artists to present their research, whether it involves completed projects or works in progress. This total artistic freedom, combined with the wild beauty of the performance venues, attracts creators from France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and other European countries, making the festival a place for cross-border artistic encounters and emulation.

A festival rooted in its territory

Beyond the summer performances, the Premiers Actes Festival is part of a sustainable territorial project. Since 2022, the Travaux Publics company has been developing literary and theatrical mediation activities in the Vosges valleys and in Mulhouse: residencies in schools with the creation Étincelles for young audiences, writing and acting workshops in partnership with La Filature and Espace 110. This proximity dimension makes the festival a committed cultural player serving the democratization of contemporary theatre in rural and peri-urban areas.