Since their teenage years, Cecilia  Bengolea and François Chaignaud have been going to discos and have  turned it into a place where to practise. From London to NYC, they go  from club to club: drum&bass, jungle, dubstep, reggae, bashement,  house, voguing, hype as anthropological research centres. That is where  they have become familiar with and learnt Jamaican dancehall, krump,  house, split & jump… – dances which, regardless of their formal and  spiritual differences, have a certain playfulness in common (with music,  and between the technical principles and the ideals determining them).

As for altered Natives’ Say Yes To Another Excess ⎯ TWERK,  they collectively and intuitively make their way through a specific  impure writing process, enlightened by graphic and organic devoured  dances – beyond references. Together with Alex Mugler, Ana Pi and Elisa  Yvelin, they have set themselves the challenge to trust dance, its  expressive, brotherly, poetic, preconscious and discursive powers.

This work and this playful writing  process are achieved in close relation to a musical investigation around  Grime music. As an electro music that comes from East London in the  early 2000s, Grime combines, mixes and transforms sounds from dancehall,  hip-hop and UK garage.

The syncretic ferociousness of this  style, which seems to be hanging between two contradictory speeds,  between the abstraction of synthetic sounds and MCs’ sensual emergency,  interacts with the various influences which have inspired the dances. It  is the first time that DJs from the Grime scene (Elijah and Skilliam of  London label Butterz) play in a theatre and collaborate with  contemporary dancers.

Born in Buenos-Aires, Cecilia Bengolea studied urban dance forms, before to pursue studies in anthropological dances with Eugenio Barba, as well as Philosophy and Art History at the University of Buenos Aires. In 2001, she moved to Paris and followed the training Ex.e.r.c.e. directed by Mathilde Monnier in Montpellier.
In dialogue with Levi Strauss’s œuvre Tristes tropiques, Cecilia Bengolea co-directed two videos in 2011: La Beauté (tôt) vouée à se défaire with Donatien Veisman and Cri de Pilaga with Juliette Bineau. As a dancer, choreographer and performance artist, Cecilia Bengolea perceives dance and performance as ‘animated sculpture’ and welcomes the fact that these forms allow her to become both ‘object and subject at the same time’.

In 2016, Bengolea was commissioned by the ICA for London Art Night 2016 to present a video installation into holographic mirrors at Covent Garden Market and perform an outdoor participatory dancehall practice in the historical West Piazza of Covent Garden with ballerina Erika Miyauichi and dancehall artist Damion BG Dancerz. Bengolea also works with artists Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Monika Gintersdorfer, Knut Klassen as well as Jamaican Dancehall artists such as Joan Mendy and Damion BG dancerz. In collaboration with Jeremy Deller (UK), she co-directed the film RythmAssPoetry (rap) commissioned by the Biennale de Lyon 2015. Their second film, Bombom’s Dream, shot in Jamaica in 2016, commissioned by Hayward Gallery London and Sao Paulo Biennial 2016.

Source: The company Vlovajob Pru 's website

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Since 2001, the National Center for Dance (CND) has been making recordings of its shows and educational programming and has created resources from these filmed performances (interviews, danced conferences, meetings with artists, demonstrations, major lessons, symposia specialized, thematic arrangements, etc.).

Cecilia Bengolea and François Chaignaud have been collaborating since 2005. Together, they created Pâquerette (2005-2008), Sylphides (2009), Castor et Pollux (2010), Danses Libres (2010), (M)IMOSA (with Trajal Harrell and Marlene Monteiro Freitas, 2011), altered natives’ Say Yes To Another Excess –TWERK (2012), Dub Love (2013), DFS  (2016). In 2014, the Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon commissioned them to  create a ballet for seven dancers on pointe shoes, set to Toru Takemitsu  music composition How slow the wind. In 2015, Bengolea and Chaignaud were commissioned by the Ballet de Lorraine to produce a new work set to Devoted, a music by Philip Glass. On the same year, they premiered a new piece, entitled The Lighters’ Dancehall Polyphony for Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal. The performance Sylphides,  written for vacuumed bodies in latex fetish envelopes won the Award de  la Critique de Paris in 2009 and the Young Artist Prize at Gwangju  Biennial, Korea in 2014. Over the past few years, they have presented  work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Kitchen in New York, Tokyos  Spiral in Japan, the Biennale de la danse de Lyon, at Sadler’s Wells  Theatre in London, the Faena Art Center in Buenos Aires, of fig-2 at  ICA, London, at the Festival d’Avignon, the Festival d’Automne à Paris,  Montpellier Danse, ImpulsTanz in Vienna, deSingel in Antwerp, the Teatro  de la Ribera in Buenos Aires, at the Panorama Festival of Rio de  Janeiro, at the Centre National de la danse in Pantin, SESC in Sao Paulo  and most recently at Kyoto Experiment, the Kyoto International  Performing Arts Festival in October 2018.

Source: Company's website

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