Alice KUDLAK
Stage Director

Alice received a creation grant to help her with her play Les Enfants-pierre.

What is your artistic background ?
I have always wanted to create. While sorting through my childhood belongings this year, I found a surprising number of stories, often notebooks whose first pages were filled with very dramatic beginnings, written in clumsy handwriting with colored pens. I was fortunate to see many performances, and as far back as I can remember, I imagined myself going on stage to join the troupes. I drew and dreamed of making comics, so I set myself the goal of attending the École Européenne Supérieure de l'Image in Angoulême when I was in middle school. The thing is, in the meantime, I had started doing theater in high school, where I had excellent teachers and excellent guest artists from the region and from the troupe that was then in residence at the CDN de Besançon. Somewhere between working on masks, Hamlet, and Novarina, I understood that I desired more than anything to do theater, which terrified me quite a bit, given that until then my practice had been self-taught and solitary. After a year at the Beaux Arts in Angoulême (I still had to check), I took the plunge. My first creation, Forêt/Cache/Arbre, a radio play, began in 2016 as an interactive installation, and then as a series broadcast by RTBF in 2018. It's a very long-term project; we're taking up the performance format again in 2026, and season 2 should come out around the same time! Reuniting with the team after ten years was absolutely crazy. I was fortunate to join promotion X of the Théâtre National de Bretagne, and the teaching of artists such as Arthur Nauzyciel, Gisèle Vienne, Phia Menard, Pascal Rambert, Steven Cohen, and Laurent Poitreneau greatly expanded my vision of creation. Upon graduating, the Théâtre de Caen commissioned me to write a libretto for their choir and the San Francisco Girls Chorus, which Thierry Pécou set to music, and which my father, Bernard Kudlak, and I co-directed, with circus artists and sixty children on stage. It was very moving to collaborate across generations to defend a subject sacred to me, that of the future of life on Earth. The show Les Enfants-pierre, completed at La Chartreuse - centre national des écritures du spectacle, saw a first stage realized at Maison Casarès in 2024, thanks to the support notably from TNB and the city of Rennes, and will resume at Le Bercail and La Nef in 2026.
Alongside my own creations, I continue to act, which is equally essential to me, this year for Anaëlle Queuille, Ariane Issartel, and Jing Wang. Acting and directing are two sides of the same coin for me; one teaches me how to do the other and vice versa.

How do you view your profession today ?

Theater is for me an absolutely necessary space for being in the world, both for navigating its violence and sorrows and for making it more vast and full of possibilities. I find there a bearable, even exhilarating, contact with the things that compose it, and I feel more in my place there than anywhere else. In theater, nothing can be too frightening or too wonderful that we cannot look it in the eye. Performances have on me the effect of a ceremony of deliverance, whether I am a spectator, author, or actress. The goal, therefore, is to make this deliverance accessible to whoever wants to experience it.
The name of my company, Quelque Refuge (Some Refuge), captures the essence of this project: a refuge is a place where one takes shelter for a time only, to regain strength, and from which one emerges with more weapons and courage to face reality when the time comes.
To produce this effect, one must be generous and clever. It's something like this: create a resonance chamber for each person on the team to deposit a part of themselves in their proper place, and for all these parts to sing together. When I say everyone, I mean whether it's the direction, the actors, the technical creators... We must invent a mechanism for it to work. It's delicate. Each thing given to the show by everyone must be given wholeheartedly, and one must give just enough, so that each person is augmented by this gift and not diminished, and leave room for the audience to also find their place.
It's wonderful to have the right to take all of this very seriously. I often think about it in the most ridiculous moments of the process. It makes me happy.
The solidarity between actors, between members of a team to make a play sing, is one of the most beautiful things in the world in my eyes, whether I'm on stage or when it's my project being carried. It makes one believe that the world is possible.

Where do you see yourself in 5 years? In 10 years?
Graduating from school was like a runaway train that didn't stop for four years. The opportunities have been unique, multiple, always surprising. I choose to believe that things will continue in this direction and that I will be able to continue creating works in the mediums that attract me (after radio, puppetry, opera, who knows? A video game? A film? Pantomime? A wrestling tournament?). Each story I write is written entirely in the discipline in which I realize it, drawing on its specificities. I also want to continue supporting others' projects and putting a part of myself into them, given wholeheartedly.
The future seems a bit uncertain these days for art and collective endeavors. So more than ever, I want to dream fully and find how to make the dream real. I hear a lot of injunctions to produce quickly, to produce consumable content, to produce a lot and distribute little. I want to disobey. Not to wait for production deus ex machina to create either, but to take new paths when necessary, to be patient when necessary, and to find the times and places for the things given to resonate in their proper place.

This interview was conducted in 2025
Photography credit: Isabelle Chapuis