Devising&
Directing
I work as an independent director, deviser and performer.
I believe in collaboration. The body is at the center of my work. All bodies. I am intrigued by humans. I am a theater artist because I am dedicated to unveil the masks we put on ourselves or have been imprisoned by. Laughter is at the heart of my shows as well as tenderness.
I want my audience to come out of the theater with lust, hunger, curiosity, more questions than answers and immense love for themselves and each other.
Featured work
Spinning Immigrant
Creator | Performer | Co-Producer
Directed by Guillaume Servely
Live Arts
We, the people. We have many different stories and realities. We, immigrants. We share similar conflicted emotions.
I became a US citizen in 2013 and I had to make a show about it. I met and interviewed many immigrants to hear what it means to be an immigrant for them and reflect on my own life. These individual encounters allowed a mix of emotion, trama, opportunity, fear and courage that was embodied in my show. My DJ skills mixed the sounds and voices of our lived experience into a night that both revealed to the audience our true stories and transformed the stage into a shared emotional landscape.
Oedipus at FDR
Creator | Producer | Director
FDR Skatepark, Philadelphia
Written by Suli Holum
Emmanuelle Delpech found this astonishing venue, conceived and directed this thrilling version of the myth of Oedipus at Colonus and assembled a fine and diverse cast, including a chorus of skateboarders.
Madame Douce-Amère
Creator | Performer | Co-Producer
Paris/Avignon
Fringe Arts Festival/Walnut Street Theater
Originally created in collaboration with Claude Ferrie and directed by Celine Rames
Directed by David Brick
If ever I'm lost in a country where the language is hopelessly opaque, I hope Emmanuelle Delpech is with me.
Madame Douce-Amère is romantic and sad — but also funny, surprising and a superb vehicle for the immensely talented Emmanuelle Delpech-Ramey, the co-creator and principal performer. It's easy to fall in love with Madame Douce-Amère because Madame Delpech-Ramey is irresistible. She has the kind of mobile face the French call jolie laide, and it's alive to every emotional nuance.
Bang
Director
Fringe Arts Festival
Original idea by Charlotte Ford
Created in collaboration with Lee Ann Etzold and Sarah Sanford
Director Emmanuelle Delpech's penchant for pushing her audience's physical comfort zones has played out in past Live Arts Festivals, when her Madame Douce-Amere spooned yogurt into viewers' mouths or pulled an audience member onstage to brush her hair. Now, she's bringing her sensitive and engrossing physical style— as well as more shared food— as the director of Bang, a show conceived by the Pig Iron veteran Charlotte Ford.
Remember Paris
Creator | Director
Kimmel Center
With organist Thierry Escaich
Jacques Lecoq informs everything I do. It's definitely a starting point for me. I'm a real disciple of Lecoq and it is a part of everything I touch. Lecoq had taught me a sense of theatricality, of spectacle. I think about shapes first, about external attributes, gestures, and pictorial codes of everyday life or epic moments. I like geometry in space, in an emotion.
The Kimmel is a big place and this show requires a specific organization between body, space, music and images. The Lecoq teachings ask the performers to go beyond their own body, the givens of an everyday, rather small, casual and boring body when on stage, on a big stage. Lecoq calls the body of an actor an instrument. The vocabulary we use in rehearsal is very much a musical vocabulary. We talk about rhythm, suspension, accents, crescendo.
My actors/performers/creators are not just interpreters. They are makers. They own the writing of the piece more than I do. Improvisation is the key to that work. Who's improvising? Them ... I provoke them, tease them and finally guide them once we have material. That is very much part of the Lecoq school. We are all makers. We make the show together; it's a collective creation.
The Legend of
Georgia McBride
Director
Written by Matthew Lopez
Produced by the Arden theater
Fabulous. If a one-word review would do it, that would be the word.
The Legend of Georgia McBride provides an evening of over-the-top fun. It is also an entertaining introduction to the genre of drag cabaret, in the narrative format of a play with music, for traditional theater-going audiences who might not otherwise seek out the experience. It’s all about the joy of acceptance!
Watch the trailer
La Bête
Director
Written by David Hirson
Produced by the Arden theater
Under Emmanuelle Delpech’s well-balanced direction, the Arden’s stellar ensemble brings out both the fun and the meaning of Hirson’s dazzling script, displaying perfect control of its witty verbal gymnastics and an on-point delivery of its serious themes of cultural decline, socio-economic contrasts in stratified communities, and the seemingly incompatible values of artistic excellence with low-brow popular appeal.
‘Excellence Must Struggle to Survive!’ Vive l’excellence! It is alive and well at the Arden.
Watch the trailer
Tartuffe
Director (Thesis)
Written by Moliere
Translated by Ranjit Bolt
Temple Repertory Theater
Director Emmanuelle Delpech's Tartuffe uses Ranjit Bolt's contemporary translation from Molière's 1669 French, making his bouncing rhyming couplets conversational. The text's poetic artificiality is amplified in Delpech's witty production, from its tiny white chairs to the whiteface makeup — sorta Barnum & Bailey, kinda Cabaret — which, along with inspired performances, make this classic fresh and fun.
At a time in American politics when hypocrisy reigns supreme and religion is used as a weapon, Delpech’s production serves as an effective warning against false prophets and their brand of moral certitude.
