Lukas Hemleb - director

“Lukas Hemleb seems to be always at a place where you didn’t expect him to be” wrote a journalist some years ago. He grew up in Germany and lives and works since many years in France. Research on various cultural backgrounds is what characterizes his work over two decades. His projects cover a wide range of authors, from ancient verse to contemporary literature and have been performed at a wide range of  important theaters in Paris and all over France, as well as in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Italy, and Spain. His productions for the “Comédie-Française” have been sent on tour in several european countries and broadcasted by television in France and Germany.

In Opera his repertory includes contemporary works as well as great operas by Verdi and Mozart. He is present at some major opera stages in Europe — in Paris, Lisbon, Vienna, London, at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and in Madrid. He also focused on Baroque repertoire. His collaboration with Thomas Hengelbrock contributed to the rediscovery of forgotten operas by composers such as Alessandro Scarlatti and Agostino Steffani.  He directed Telemaco in Schwetzinger Festspiele, Ariodante by Haendel at Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and Vienna, Niobe, regina di Tebe in Schwetzingen, Lisbon, London and Luxembourg. In 2010 he directed Giulio Cesare by Haendel at Opera Dortmund and at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden. 

Very engaged in the study of chinese culture, he has run several productions in Taiwan, in collaboration with the Han Tang Yuefu Company and with the Xinxin Nanguan Workshop. The Legend of the Luo River Goddess was invited to the Forbidden City in Beijing. In 2008 he directed the contemporary opera Black Bearded Bible Man by Gordon Chin in Taipei. In 2009 he staged Marina Tsvetaeva’s verse drama Fedra in Moscow. The Nanguan opera Feather was created 2010 in Taipei and invited to the New Vision Arts Festival in Hongkong. In January 2011 he staged Simon Stephens’ play Harper Regan in Amiens and Paris. In Lyon he created a theater and music installation about Rimbaud called Z - Je me crois en enfer donc j’y suis in collaboration with visual artists and musicians from the U.S. and Japan.  In 2012 he spent seven months at the “Villa Medicis-hors-les-murs” in Kyoto in Japan.