People Will People You
Steven Cohen (Lille / Johannesburg)
World premiere | Co-production | English | No translation | Ages 12 and up
Steven Cohen is an artist with a lot to say. From experience, from conviction and from the perspective of his complex cultural and artistic identity. Without exaggeration, the South African living in France is one of the most exciting personalities on our stages. Two years ago, euro-scene Leipzig had the privilege of experiencing him in PUT YOUR HEART UNDER YOUR FEET... AND WALK! as Pierrot the Extravagant, and as in all his performances, the body was the focus, both as a means of expression and as the subject of his pleas for tolerance and freedom. But now Cohen takes the floor and addresses the audience directly. In PEOPLE WILL PEOPLE YOU, this creates a direct, open and liberating exchange of ideas with this gentle humanist, who slowly dissolves the contrast between performing artist and watching audience. New forms of thinking and acting become conceivable and begin to fill a shared space. Cohen initiates a ritual that invites us to undergo a transformation together and to cross the boundary between art and everyday life. In a world that is increasingly slipping into virtual spaces, direct encounters offer precious opportunities to experience existence and resistance. PEOPLE WILL PEOPLE YOU is an act of liberation, a gift to the audience in Leipzig, who are the first in the world to experience Cohen's transformation.
Credits
Choreography, Stage Design, Costume Steven Cohen Lighting Design Yvan Labasse Video Bapiste Evrad Production Management Samuel Mateu
Production Cie Steven Cohen Co-Production Théâtre National de Bretagne, Centre Dramatique National (Rennes), euro-scene Leipzig Funding Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles de Nouvelle-Aquitaine
Guest Performance Support with the kind support of the Institut français and the French Ministry of Culture
Creation euro-scene Leipzig, 7 November 2025
Biography STEVEN COHEN
Steven Cohen was born in 1962 in South Africa, he now lives in France. Performer, choreographer and visual artist, he has orchestrated interventions in public places, in art galleries or on stages, notably for the Festival d’Automne, at the Center Pompidou in Paris, at the ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival, at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda, at the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris, in Montpellier Danse, at the Festival d’Avignon, for the Munich Opera Festival at the Bavarian State Opera, at the Escena Contemporánea Festival in Madrid, at the Bozar in Brussels, at the Oktoberdans festival in Bergen , at the Canadian Stage in Toronto… He has participated in residencies at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, and the Center for Performance Research in New York.
From 2003 to 2008, Steven Cohen and his partner, Elu Kieser, were associated artists of the Ballet Atlantique/Régine Chopinot in La Rochelle, France.
His works as a visual artist have been regularly exhibited around the world since the 1980s. The South African National Gallery in Cape Town is currently preparing a retrospective exhibition of his entire work scheduled for 2024.
He also runs workshops around the world that question the body as a scenographic object.
His work brings to light that which lies on the margins of society, beginning with his own identity as a gay, Jewish, white, South African man. Far from being narcissistic, the staging of his body is influenced by his own story and history and constitutes a means to exploring the flaws and grace of humanity. His ultra-sophisticated makeup is as elegant as it is surprising. His eccentric costumes, intense and ethereal at the same time, borrow from the world of luxury and elegance, from archaic rituals, from a bourgeois or colonial past as well as diverse queer inspirations. They reveal more than they hide and restrict the body and the movement, as if to simultaneously mark both the weight of the world and the restraining force different powers exert on the body. They are also, above all else, montages or collages created with the body itself, that transform it into chimeras or hybrid-beings whose identity is uncertain, multiple and fluid.
In this way Steven Cohen dresses up or rather metamorphoses into creatures as disconcerting as they are colourful. By instigating interventions on stage or in public spaces, he creates breaches in the day-to-day and in the spirit as well; not to trip people up but rather in order to finish with preconceived certitudes and together face the indifference currently gaining ground within our societies.
On 11 December 2025, a major retrospective of Steven Cohen will open at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town. The museum announces Steven Cohen as “one of South Africa’s most provocative and pioneering artists”:
"From Steven Cohen’s early textile works, to uninvited public interventions and haunting performances for stage, the exhibition represents the breadth of a profoundly influential career. Cohen’s work is about love, loss, identity, and remembrance. In Jewish tradition, to say “I wish you a long life” to the bereaved is a message of condolence and hope. This exhibition honours that sentiment – inviting you to reflect, feel, and witness a life lived through art."
Steven Cohen’s visual artist activities are represented by STEVENSON Gallery in South Africa. https://www.stevenson.info/artist/steven-cohen
More information: https://steven-cohen.com
Guest Performance Support
With the kind support of the Institut français and the French Ministry of Culture
Main Supporters
euro-scene leipzig is institutionally supported by the City of Leipzig and the Saxon State Ministry for Higher Education, Culture and Tourism. Co-financed by tax revenue on the basis of the budget approved by the Saxon State Parliament.