Seuls en Scène 2024 presents Voyage of the Sable Venus by Robin Coste Lewis read by Alice Diop

A Black woman roams museums at night, searching in her dreams for the fragmented bodies of all the Black women who populate the margins of artworks throughout history. She invites them to join her for a journey through time, on a ship captained by the Black Venus.

Upon discovering the short prose piece that serves as an epilogue to Robin Coste Lewis’s poetry collection Voyage of the Sable Venus (2015 National Book Award for Poetry), award-winning French filmmaker Alice Diop (Saint Omer; Nous) saw the themes and questions that drive her own work transfigured on a poetic, political, and epic scale. Diop was inspired to adapt the text in her first piece for the stage, offering both a radical re-reading of art history and an intimate portrait of the writer, protagonist, and performer.

At Seuls en Scène, Alice Diop will read the text of Voyage of the Sable Venus in a work-in-progress version of a performance scheduled to premiere at Festival d’Automne/MC93 Bobigny in Fall 2025.

About the Artists:

Alice Diop is a filmmaker based in Seine-Saint-Denis. After an education in the humanities, she has been making documentaries and fiction films since 2005. Her short film Vers la tendresse won the César Award for Best Short Film in 2017. Her first documentary feature La Permanence won the top award in the French competition section of Cinéma du Réel (Paris) in 2017. Her second feature documentary Nous won awards for Best Documentary Film and Best Film in the Encounters section at the Berlin Film Festival in 2021. Her first fiction feature Saint Omer won the Silver Lion and the Golden Lion of the Future at the Venice Film Festival in 2022, a French Academy Award César for Best First Film, and represented France at the 2023 Oscars. She is currently a visiting lecturer at Harvard University.

Nicholas Elliott is a writer and French-English translator who lives in Woodside, Queens. He has collaborated in different roles with theater makers including Richard Maxwell and New York City Players, The Wooster Group, Jeanne Balibar, Pascal Rambert, Olivier Letellier/Théâtre du Phare, David Geselson. His most recent published translations are Footlights: Critical Notebook 1970-1982 by Serge Daney (Semiotext(e)) and A Life in Letters by Simone Weil (Harvard University Press).

Robin Coste Lewis is the author of Voyage of the Sable Venus, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry and a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The book was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker and The New York Times, and a best book of the last twenty years by Literary Hub. Lewis is also the coauthor, with Kevin Young, of Robert Rauschenberg: Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno. The former poet laureate of Los Angeles, she holds a PhD in Poetry and Visual Studies from the University of Southern California, an MFA in poetry from New York University, an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from Harvard’s Divinity School, and a BA from Hampshire College. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Transition, and many other journals. Lewis, who has taught at Hampshire College, Hunter College, Wheaton College, and the NYU MFA in Paris, is writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California. Her latest book is To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness (2022).

Performance will be in French. Duration: Approximately 1 hour.

Location: Rockefeller College Common Room

The conversation is free and open to the public; no tickets are required.