Venues & stages
Les Docks
- Type
- Concert hall
- Address
- Avenue de Sévelin 34, 1004 Lausanne
In the Sévelin district, right beside the Flon, Les Docks is a venue devoted to contemporary music. Here you find international headliners as much as new discoveries and Swiss bands, established or emerging. The place brings together a modular hall, from 200 to 1000 people, a Café and an exhibition gallery, in a warm atmosphere that brings audience and artists close together. Opened on 1 December 2005, the hall programmes around seventy concerts a year and holds a prime place in the Swiss music landscape.
Les Docks, twenty years of concerts in Lausanne
A contemporary-music stage in Sévelin
Opened on 1 December 2005, Les Docks has become an essential institution of the French-speaking Swiss music scene. In twenty years it has welcomed both legendary artists and young discoveries: Patti Smith, Nick Cave (with Grinderman), Korn, Megadeth, Moby, Sigur Rós, Skunk Anansie, Indochine, Catherine Ringer, Public Enemy, Einstürzende Neubauten, Body Count, M83, Kendrick Lamar, Feu! Chatterton and Kim Wilde.
The hall can hold up to 1000 people and offers an eclectic, multigenerational programme: “we are lucky to welcome, depending on the artists, people aged between 16 and 70” its director sums up (RTS, December 2025).
Laurence Vinclair and support for emerging artists
Having taken the helm in 2007 from L’Usine in Geneva, director and programmer Laurence Vinclair has made Les Docks a reference for contemporary music in French-speaking Switzerland. Since 2017, the Proxima programme supports four young local talents each season: guidance, connections with better-known artists who become their mentors, residencies, a promotional pack and videos.
Subsidies account for only about a quarter of the hall’s budget, which also relies on well-known bands to balance its accounts and benefits from the solidarity between French-speaking Swiss clubs through the umbrella association Petzi. For its twentieth anniversary, in December 2025, Les Docks offered burlesque cabaret, a Proxima gala and an electro night.