Etienne Pluss
Set Designer
© Eléna Bauer / Opéra national de Paris
Set designer Etienne Pluss began his career assisting Achim Freyer and Karl-Ernst Herrmann. He started designing his own sets in 2000, most recently for Christof Loy's production of La Rondine at Opera Zurich, Don Carlo in Naples and Il viaggio: Dante in Aix en Provence, both directed by Claus Guth, Il trittico at the Salzburg Festival (Christof Loy) and Weinberg's The (female) Passenger at Oper Graz, directed by Nadja Loschky. In recent seasons he has worked at leading theatres including the Burgtheater, Akademietheater and Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna, the Berlin and Hannover state operas, Oper Leipzig, the Opéra national de Paris, Oper Göteborg, the Staatsoper in Prague, Theater Basel, the Opéra de Dijon and Schauspiel houses in Leipzig, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Oslo, and at the Berlin Ensemble. He works with other directors including George Tabori, Claus Guth, Philipp Himmelmann, Enrico Lübbe, Adriana Altaras, Sabrina Hölzer, Patrick Schlösser, Andrea Schwalbach, Philip Tiedemann and Joël Lauwers. Hänsel und Gretel in Göteborg was his first production with Katharina Thoma, with whom he created Martha and a Pergolesi double bill at Oper Frankfurt, where they both enjoyed great success with a wonderful production of Hoffmann's The Bandits, which is followed by this new production of Handel's Giulio Cesare in Egitto, directed by Nadja Loschky. Other work has included Violetter Schnee / Violet Snow at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, which won a 2019 Deutsche Theaterpreis DER FAUST prize for best set of the year, La Bòheme at the Opéra Bastille, Tristan und Isolde at Oper Leipzig and Simon Boccanegra at Opera de Dijon. He has also designed sets for fashion shows in Milan and Berlin. Etienne Pluss ran an art gallery in Geneva before studying set design at the University of Arts in Berlin.