Choreographer Simone Mousset Makes Edinburgh Festival Fringe Debut With THE PASSION OF ANDREA 2

Award-winning choreographer Simone Mousset will make her Edinburgh Festival Fringe debut with the silly and surreal The Passion of Andrea 2 at Dance Base.

The performance is part of the first official Luxembourg Showcase of dance at the festival, bringing three exciting movement artists to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024.

Created by leading Luxembourgish choreographer Simone Mousset (she/her), The Passion of Andrea 2 is a mischievous con artist of a dance theatre piece about feelings of uneasiness, the inability to fully understand, and the painful desire for more.

Inspired by an aspiration to capture confusion, fear and overwhelm in a world increasingly divided by anger, conflict, instability, mistrust and opinion, The Passion of Andrea 2 masquerades as a sequel to an earlier non-existent version of itself, presenting a solution that constantly escapes us.

Mixing absurdity, humour and laugh-out loud levels of silliness, with a form that combines comedy, dance, interactive games, musicals, opera and theatre, The Passion of Andrea 2 has its Edinburgh Festival Fringe debut at Assembly @ Dance Base from Tuesday 13 - Sunday 25 August (not Mondays) at 7pm.

This follows its London premiere at The Place in May 2024, where Mousset is Associate Artist, and features performers A de la Fe (they/them), Bryn Thomas (he/him) and Lewys Holt (they/them) who each play Andrea.

Mousset is a multi-form artist based between London, Luxembourg and France, where the work has previously been presented, which include performances at the world-leading Avignon Festival.

Mousset’s work incorporates elements of dance, music, performance, opera and theatre into her idiosyncratic works. Her choreographic language articulates textures around the uncertain, the chaotic, and the unresolved.

Through the creation of playful and poetic worlds, situated on the border between fiction and a heightened reality, her work opens up spaces for existential questionings steeped in humour, strangeness, the surreal, and the fantastical. Mousset is also the creator of the fictitious Ballet National Folklorique du Luxembourg, which is part of Luxembourg's forgotten, mythical past, and currently on tour in Japan.

She has received a number of awards, including the 2017 Luxembourgish Dance Award and is currently associate artist at The Place in London and supported by the Fondation Cléo Thiberge Edrom. Her company, Simone Mousset Projects, was founded in 2018 and has been supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg since 2020. 

The Passion of Andrea 2 is one of three performances within the Luxembourg Showcase, which will come to Edinburgh courtesy of Kultur | lx – Arts Council Luxembourg, an initiative created in July 2020 by the country’s Ministry of Culture with the aim of supporting, promoting and developing the Luxembourgish cultural scene.

In addition to Mousset, Jill Crovisier and Giovanni Zazzera are also performing works as part of the Showcase. While these artists differ in style and career stage, they share a fresh approach and strong individual visual identities. 

Talking about The Passion of Andrea 2, Simone Mousset said, ‘As an artist, I make work about how I see and engage with the world. The Passion of Andrea 2 was born out of a feeling of overwhelm, during times when I could feel the pressure to have an opinion on everything.

This evolved into the absurdist, fantastical and surreal world of the work, which uses comedy, humour and play to explore these feelings of unease, during times of confusion, confrontation, and tensions of power struggle.’

The Passion of Andrea 2 has its Edinburgh Festival Fringe debut at Assembly @ Dance Base from Tuesday 13 - Sunday 25 August (not Mondays) at 7pm.

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