Dominique Pitoiset Director

Season 24/25 Artist

Dominique Pitoiset studied architecture and then visual arts at the Beaux-Arts in Paris before enrolling at the École Supérieure d’art dramatique du Théâtre national de Strasbourg (TNS). On graduating in 1981, he became an assistant to Jean-Pierre Vincent, Manfred Karge and Matthias Langhoff. In 1983, he decided to found his own company as a parallel venture. In 1996, he was appointed director of the Dijon National Theatre Bourgogne. His eclectic choices led him to juggle contemporary texts and repertoire classics and cast a unique perspective on both. He staged a trilogy of Shakespearean works: Othello at the Théâtre national de Bretagne and the Théâtre national de Chaillot, The Tempest at the Teatro Farnese di Parma for the Teatro Due, and Verdi’s Macbeth at the Teatro Regio in Parma. He became associate director at the Teatro Due in Parma and the Teatro Stabile in Turin. He then taught directing and stage design at the Institute of architecture in Venice, then in Milan and Turin. From 2004 to 2013, he headed the CDN in Bordeaux (TnBA-Théâtre national de Bordeaux en Aquitaine). In 2007, he created the École Supérieure de Théâtre de Bordeaux en Aquitaine. In 2009, he began a cycle of North American theatre productions with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? and then Death of a Salesman. In June 2011, he directed Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac for the Ruhrfestspiele in Recklinghausen. In 2014, he became an associate artist at the Théâtre Bonlieu Scène nationale in Annecy for a period of three years and moved his company to Dijon, his home town. He premiered the third instalment of his American trilogy: August: Osage County by Tracy Letts in Annecy and, in 2016, he directed Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui with Philippe Torreton. He has directed numerous operas during his career, including Don Giovanni and Falstaff at the Paris Opera, Haydn’s L’Isola disabitata, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice for the Paris Opera’s Atelier Lyrique, The Turn of the Screw and Salomé at the Bordeaux Opera, La Bohème at the Théâtre du Capitole in Toulouse.