Emma De Foucaud - A L'ancienne

Emma de Foucaud at Espace Gerson

At Espace Gerson, we are delighted to welcome Emma de Foucaud with A l'ancienne, a stage piece perfectly attuned to our intimate room and its taste for sharp writing, live spontaneity, and audience proximity. Our stage is built for artists who thrive on nuance and rhythm, and Emma’s presence embodies that spirit: a performer who invites the audience closer, crafts a shared atmosphere, and plays with timing and texture in a way that makes each performance feel handcrafted. We curate shows for their capacity to spark conversation after the lights come up, and A l'ancienne does exactly that—by drawing us into a playful, sometimes tender dialogue with the past, with “how things used to be,” and with everything that has quietly changed in the everyday. From the vantage point of our backstage to the warm sightlines of the room, we can already feel how her energy will animate the space, catching the small smiles, the knowing nods, and the sudden laughter that travel so well through Espace Gerson’s intimate acoustics.

About A l'ancienne

A l'ancienne is Emma de Foucaud’s new creation, a vibrant, observational piece anchored in the here-and-now but tinted with the charm of yesterday’s rituals. It is a work that treats “old-school” not as nostalgia for its own sake, but as a lens: a way to look at habits we lost, the analog gestures we still miss, and the rituals we reinvent without noticing. On our stage, this translates into a live experience that is as musical as it is narrative, with shifts of pace, teasing callbacks, and moments of deft physicality that keep the room alive. The show delights in the textures of daily life—family codes, city manners, objects with patina—and holds them up to the spotlight with both affection and mischief. Emma’s craft speaks to our audience’s taste for language, character, and timing; she moves between quick, finely chiseled beats and longer scenes that bloom into full portraits, the kind of passages where you can hear the room lean in. A l'ancienne is carried by a voice that is precise without being severe, generous without losing edge, and it finds in Espace Gerson the perfect balance between sparkle and intimacy.

For us at Espace Gerson, hosting this performance also means celebrating the current momentum of Emma de Foucaud’s artistic journey. A l'ancienne arrives as a fresh chapter, the unmistakable sign of an artist refining her tools and widening her palette, eager to meet audiences in rooms that bring out detail and conversation. As part of our season, the show sits beautifully alongside our programming of incisive, human-scale stage work: pieces that breathe in the contact with the audience, where a glance can cue a shift and a shared memory can trigger a cascade of recognition across the seats. Our team has tailored the technical environment to embrace the show’s dynamics—warm sound, crisp focus, and a frame that amplifies the subtlety of performance. If you have visited us before, you know the pleasure of arriving early to settle into the room’s convivial atmosphere; if you are discovering Espace Gerson with this date, you will find a venue that champions artists at key moments in their trajectory, when a new creation like A l'ancienne asks to be experienced up close. We invite you to join us and let this live encounter—with its humor, its tenderness, and its keen eye—unfold in real time from our stage in the heart of Lyon.