Productions

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At the crossroads of musical theatre, cabaret and visual creation, Elsa Bontempelli’s productions blend emotion, storytelling and imagination. Through a distinctive stage language combining text, music, movement and imagery, her work brings timeless stories, characters and works to audiences of all ages.

The visual worlds and digital tools she develops extend this approach, enriching the audience’s experience.

In the press!

Les Vilaines

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Les Vilaines was my first original production.

It holds a very special place in my work, as it grew out of both a family story and my own experience as a stage performer.

Some of the text was written by my father before he passed away in 2014. Seeing his words live on, spoken by performers and shared with an audience, became one of the deepest reasons behind my decision to start writing and creating for the stage. In that sense, Les Vilaines became a quiet but deeply meaningful tribute to what he passed on to me.

The production takes us behind the scenes of music hall and the great Parisian revues — a world I experienced from the inside during my years at the Lido de Paris. Behind the costumes, sequins and glamour, I discovered women, individual stories, vulnerabilities, rivalries and a humanity that deserved to be brought to the stage.

Creating Les Vilaines was an enormous challenge. It was my first production, my first creative adventure, and my first experience of everything involved in turning an idea into a living stage production. Looking back, I realise that it already contained everything that continues to inspire my work today: passing stories on, preserving memory, exploring human lives, and bringing emotion and entertainment together.

Poster for the show Les Vilaines, a musical written and directed by Elsa Bontempelli.

Nutcracker

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The Nutcracker was born in a very particular context: the COVID lockdown.

Like so many artists at the time, I suddenly found myself without stages, rehearsals or the possibility of working with others. Confined to my 12-square-metre apartment in Paris, I nevertheless felt a stronger need to create than ever.

That was when I discovered Blender, the open-source 3D creation software. What began as curiosity quickly became a passion, and I spent the COVID period teaching myself to use it intensively. At a time when the world seemed to be shrinking, this new tool opened up a limitless creative space.

Very quickly, an idea emerged: to use these new tools not simply as visual effects, but as part of the storytelling itself, interacting with the performers on stage. For The Nutcracker, I created the visual worlds and digital animations that extend the production’s imaginary universe and accompany the dancers throughout their journey.

This production marked an important turning point in my work. It became the starting point for an exploration that continues today: bringing live performance and digital tools into dialogue to enrich the audience’s experience while opening up new possibilities for creation.

Poster for C@sse-Noisette, a musical family written and directed by Elsa Bontempelli, combining dance, music and digital creation.

Victor Lustig,

the man who sold the Eiffel Tower

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Victor Lustig is undoubtedly the most ambitious production I have created to date.

At a time when economic constraints often push productions towards smaller casts, I wanted to take on the opposite challenge: to create a full-scale musical with eleven performers on stage. A generous, vibrant and accessible production, with the scale and energy of the large theatrical productions that have always inspired me.

The choice of subject came almost naturally. The story of Victor Lustig, the man who managed to sell the Eiffel Tower, has an extraordinary theatrical quality. His life — fascinating, funny and dizzying in equal measure — unfolds against a period I find particularly inspiring: the first decades of the twentieth century, from the excitement of the Roaring Twenties to the birth of jazz, cabaret and the great figures of entertainment.

It brings together everything that fuels my artistic imagination: larger-than-life characters, a sense of comic exuberance, fast-paced storytelling and music at the heart of the production.

This production also marked an important step in the way I work. The challenge of conceiving and organising a production of this scale led me to develop my stage previsualization method much further. Using digital tools and 3D modelling, I was able to anticipate movement, staging sequences and the use of the performance space long before rehearsals began. This approach has since become an essential part of my creative process.

Poster for the musical Victor Lustig, written by Elsa Bontempelli and Adrian Delmer, directed by Elsa Bontempelli.

Swan Lake

Swan Lake grew out of a desire to continue the artistic journey that began with The Nutcracker.

The response to that first production encouraged both our partners and me to continue exploring the meeting point between live performance, our musical heritage and digital creation. Returning to the world of Tchaikovsky felt like a natural next step.

With this production, I was able to take the tools and methods developed through my previous work even further. 3D stage previsualization, now fully integrated into my creative process, made it possible to anticipate each scene, the performers’ movements and the dramaturgical structure of the production in much greater detail. This approach made the creative process considerably smoother while allowing greater freedom in the artistic choices.

Swan Lake also marks an evolution in my stage language. I continue to explore ways of bringing great works from the classical repertoire to new audiences through accessible storytelling, while developing increasingly ambitious and immersive visual worlds.

For me, this production represents a new level of maturity in my work: digital tools are no longer simply an innovation, but have become a fully integrated artistic language in the service of storytelling and emotion.

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Poster for Swan Lake, an adaptation of Tchaikovsky's ballet written and directed by Elsa Bontempelli, dance, music and digital creation.