Choreographer, performer and researcher of dance, Geisha Fontaine began her career as a ballet dancer, then trained under Merce Cunningham and Alwin Nikolais in New York and Hideyuki Yano in Paris. She then set up the centre de danse contemporaine (Centre for Contemporary Dance) Le Dansoir in Toulouse and worked as a dancer for several contemporary dance companies. In 1998, she founded the Mille Plateaux Associés dance company with Pierre Cottreau. She was the winner of the Villa Médicis – Hors les murs residence in Japan in 2010.

Awarded her art PhD from the Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Geisha Fontaine was published by the Centre national de la danse (National Dance Centre) in 2004 (a book which has been translated into Spanish and Japanese), while “Tu es le danseur”, 2008 and “Là”, 2009, were published by Micadanses. She has collaborated on several joint publications, notably those published by CNRS. She is invited regularly as an artist and a researcher to various universities in France and abroad (Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Santiago…).

Further information

Mille plateaux associés website

Updated : june 2013

Graduate of La Fémis (the French state film school), Pierre Cottreau began his artistic career as a producer and cinematographer and collaborated on several full-length films in this capacity. He explores the possible connections between the filmed image and dance. Having also studied art history, he experiments with image and film and where they overlap in different media: cinema, dance and photography. Since the creation of Mille Plateaux Associés, he has choreographed the company's pieces with Geisha Fontaine and produced several films and documentaries, in particular the evolutive film “Millibar”.

Further information : Mille plateaux associés website

2010: Loïc Touzé settles in Nantes. He engages with Anne Kerzerho "Autour de la Table". This project questions the plurality of knowledge and practises surrounding the body in different cultural contexts and the interchange between them. During the 2009/2010 season Loïc Touzé createsLa Chance at the Mettre en Scène festival (Rennes).

"La Chance" follows a line of investigation by presenting evidence into the relationship between the act of dancing such as it engages a performer in the immediacy of the stage, and the choreography in as much as it consists of coming forth in the form of writing. “To see without eyes, to feel without skin, to hear by weight, to understand that the floor is a source of imagination. To think in movement and to not be afraid of what you might encounter in the state of dance.” We can go back to "Morceau" (2001-2005), a piece conceived as an amalgam of micro-performances, to discover the start of this questioning of theatrical engagement, the expectations about a show and see the way it has informed the skills of the art-performance.
With Latifa Laâbissi (co-director of Compagnie 391 with Loïc Touzé at this time), Yves-Noël Genod and Jennifer Lacey, "Morceau" took part in restoring some of the elements which conventional stage writing is habitually driven to abandon. In 2003 "Love", then 9 in 2007 deepened the relationship with visual artist Jocelyn Cottencin. A resolved mastery of the stage and investment in firstly the discussion about how to disseminate the gesture and secondly to renounce and return to the initial intentions behind this. Rigorous and audacious, these principles of investigation call into question the very implications of the choreographic act. This is after all achieved by way of ambitious approaches coming from a unique point of view. In the position of choreographer Loïc Touzé seems to continue to stimulate and stubbornly question the movements produced by the performer so he can attain the highest level so much the sooner. Throughout this process, we remark the renewal of critical appraisal, ensuring that the formal foundations of this progression are particularly robust.

Born in 1964, Loïc Touzé entered the school of the Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris at 10 years old. From 1982 he danced in the troupe (Nureyev period) all the while taking part in numerous creations at the heart of GRCOP directed by Jacques Garnier. This was the case until he resigned in order to turn to New Dance and then he joined projects by Carolyn Carlson, Mathilde Monnier – who became one of his creative partners –, Jean-François Duroure, Catherine Diverrès and Bernardo Montet (1986-1991). The foundation of his own company with Fabienne Compet (1991) began a great period of exploration, sharpened by the discoveries on stage or in training of Dominique Bagouet (via Olivia Grandville) and Julyen Hamilton (contact-improvisation). The solo version of "Dans les Allées, les Allées",... (1995) enjoyed great success, questioning the fundamentals of choreographic writing. A whole series of projects touched upon space in relation to representation from wasteland in Bilbao with visual artist Francisco Ruiz de Infante to the Centre d’Art Contemporain de la Ferme du Buisson where "Un bloc" (1997) thwarted the principles of interactivity which were currently in vogue. In this tradition, "S’il y a Lieu" put to work a reduced setting where the evidence of the dance is ruined by being subject to commentary (1999).

To analyse the preparation of a dancer and his work, Loïc Touzé immersed himself for a whole year in the experience of Mohini Attam who trained Brigitte Châtaigner. In his solo Elucidation with saxophonist Claude Delangle (IRCAM 2004), as with numerous other works, Loïc Touzé instituted a dialogue capable of improvisation with musicians Pascal Contet, Joëlle Léandre, Vincent Courtois, Jeanne Added, Cookie and Gilles Coronado.
Installed in Rennes in 1999, Loïc Touzé activated the social and collective conditions of invention, production and diffusion in the field of choreography. "Déplacer" (2000, a co-production with La Criée Centre d'art contemporain) presented and used the work of Catherine Contour, Myriam Gourfink, Xavier Leroy, Alain Michard, Jennifer Lacey and Jocelyn Cottencin. In the Paris region Loïc Touzé co-directed the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers with Yvane Chapuis and François Piron (2001-2006), while assisting the emergence of the Rennes based project, Aéroport International, a collective of artists who contributed to the realisation of Le Garage, a space for innovative new work.
Counting himself amongst the Signataires du 20 août, Loïc Touzé has invested much thought into the teaching of dance. Co-author of 10 propositions pour une école, he has developed an important teaching role for himself at the heart of the TNB school, at the university of Rennes or Paris 8, at the CNDC in Angers and within the Ex.e.r.ce training of the CCN of Montpellier as well as an increasingly bigger role in overseas teaching. (Forum Dança - Lisbon, Impuls Tanz - Vienna, Tsekh summer school – Moscow, Instituto Universitario de Arte – Buenos Aires). 

Source : Loïc Touzé 's website (Gérard Mayen)

More information : loictouze.com

Choreographic works, installations, lecture demonstrations, pluridisciplinary collaborations: mixing genres, reflecting upon and redefining formats, Latifa Laâbissi’s work seeks to bring onstage multiple offstage perspectives; an anthropological landscape in which stories, figures and voices are placed and highlighted. Dance “codes” are disturbed by recalcitrant bodies, alternative stories, montages of materials infiltrated by certain signs of the times.

Formation /deformation
After studying at the Cunningham Studio in New York, Latifa Laâbissi began working with specific themes, including the question of the body as a zone of multiple influences, bisected by subjective and heterogenously cultural strata. Going against the prevailing abstract aesthetic, she extrapolated a movement vocabulary built from the confusion of genres and social postures, from the beginnings of modernity: a disguising of the identifications revealing the violence of conflicts involving the body and returning a twisted, contorted image.
In 2001, she created Phasmes, a work haunted by the ghosts of Dore Hoyer, Valeska Gert and Mary Wigman. She came back to Valeska Gert in the form of a “massaged lecture”, Distraction, with the dance historian Isabelle Launay, then to Mary Wigman in a lengthened version of her Witch Dance, which she called Écran somnambule [Somnambulist screen].

Disfigure
Beginning with her earliest collaborations, Laâbissi’s use of the voice and of the face as a vehicle for minority status and accents became inseparable from her dance movement. Starting in 2000, she began this process on Morceau with Loïc Touzé, Jennifer Lacey and Yves-Noël Genod. Working with postures borrowed from the grotesque, she confirmed her strategy of sliding identities and deploying different registers of representation. Figure is the name for this montage – in which auto-fiction, derision, statements, contemporary materials and visions and ghosts of dance mix and interact. In 2002, I love like animals continued in the development of relationships between the voice and the body, seeking to further disturb our reading of choreographic representation.

Disrupt
Digging subterranean links between the history of performance and collective imagination, the figure is Laâbissi’s tool for exposing certain symptoms of colonial denial/repression, and for turning against itself the mechanisms of alienation it produces. Created in 2006, Self Portrait Camouflage is indeed a critical examination of the images of otherness – somewhere between showing the body, a burlesque show and the direct confrontation of political symbols. Histoire par celui qui la raconte (2008) extends her deconstruction of the narrative and her use of the grotesque in a wide spectrum of references. In her latest work, Loredreamsong (2010), she continues this exploration in the form of a duo in which fragments of speeches, subversive rumors, states of rage and irony crash into each other, derailing subjective, political and narrative reference points. It is the unabashed reappropriation of an ambiguous imagination, manipulated by two ghosts as if it were explosive material.

Displace
For Latifa Lâabissi the artistic action implies a displacement of traditional modes of production and perception: transmission, the sharing of knowledge, materials and the porosity of formats are inseparable from the creative process. In 2005, she led the Habiter project, which examines different, everyday spaces using video. The opening-out of her working practice into other fields of research brought her to begin working at different venues, in different contexts – universities, art schools and the French national choreographic centers. During her guest residency at the Musée de la danse [Dancing Museum] in March of 2010, she organised Grimace du réel [Grimace of the real] – a pluridisciplinary manifestation putting into perspective the historical, textual and cinematographical sources used in the creation of the work. Sources, materials – documentary films, fictions and ethnographical, sociological and philosophical works continue to feed into her work and into her modalities in intervention, dissemination and experimentation with artistic forms.

Gilles Amalvi (Traduction Sara Sugihara)