Cavaliers impurs

Following Consul and Meshie, an unclassifiable performative object that played with the audience's gaze, Latifa Laâbissi and Antonia Baehr have conceived this second duet as a series of heterogeneous sequences, woven together by the thread of impurity, hybridization and collage. In Cavaliers impurs, two bodies of different shapes and sizes put images and references through the mill of their physical and vocal intensity. Laâbissi and Baehr blend their respective vocabularies – the expressiveness of the face, the cross-dressing of genders and registers – and interweave their worlds in numbers that dynamize choreographic codes and blur the lines. House of fiction, design object, ephemeral architecture, the giant cardboard box designed by scenographer Nadia Lauro serves simultaneously as a shelter, a kit accessory, a platform or a podium on which to assemble and disassemble figures that are in turn vulnerable or combative, bearing witness to a culture in pieces.

Antonia Baehr

Next to choreographic elements, Antonia Baehr is interested in rules and the laws which a society (and in particular the space in a theatre) assigns to bodies, to make them recognizable and comprehensible. She is a performer, a filmmaker and a visual artist, and as a choreographer she researches the fiction of everyday-life performance and the fiction of theatre, working at the edges of that which defines us as human beings—placing us via a voluptuous see-saw in critical positions. She is interested in the relations between humans and animals but also in elements in representational space. In her work she interacts with, among others, Neo Hülcker, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, Andrea Neumann, Latifa Laâbissi, and with others who are interested in the changing of roles: from project to project, each artist is alternately the host or the guest. Lately she has been developping collaborative duets. Baehr is also the producer for the horse whisperer and dancer Werner Hirsch, the musician and choreographer Henri Fleur, the ex-husband of Ida Wilde and composer/performer Henry Wilde.

Latifa Laâbissi

Mixing genres and redefining formats, the creations of Latifa Laâbissi bring onstage multiple off-stage / off-field elements channeling different figures and voices. The staging of these voices and the face as a vehicle of minority states ties into the danced portions of the work in Self portrait camouflage (2006) and Loredreamsong (2010). Continuing her thematic study of archives, she created Écran somnambule and La part du rite (2012) based on German dance from the 1920’s. Pourvu qu’on ait l’ivresse (2016), co-signed with the set designer Nadia Lauro, created visions, landscapes and images, combining excess, monstrosity, the beautiful, the random, the comic and fear. Since 2011, Latifa Laâbissi has been Artistic Director of the Extension Sauvage artistic and pedagogical program and festival in rural Brittany. In 2016, a monograph on the ensemble of her work was published by the Editions Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers and Les presses du réel. In 2018, she created with Antonia Baehr the performance Consul et Meshie. She also gathered in 2019 for the video Moving Backwards by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, presented in the Swiss Pavillon of the 58th Venice Biennale. The same year, her creation White Dog was shown at european festivals (Marseille, Tanz im August - Berlin, Automne à Paris, festival TNB Rennes), before a french and international tour. In 2021, the creation Ghost Party (part I) is a duet-performance with the Dutch videomaker Manon de Boer, which forms a pair with a film Ghost Party (part II). Both parts will be exhibited in FRAC Bretagne. At the same time, Latifa Laâbissi prepares a new piece with the brasilian choreographer Marcelo Evelin. This almost all-night party, entitled La Nuit tombe quand elle veut will be created by Fall 2021 at the Festival TNB in Rennes. In 2022, Fugitive Archives a group piece will be created for the CCN Ballet de Lorraine. With Antonia Baehr she presented short sketches within the context of MOVE 2021 in Centre pompidou in Paris. This performance is the starting point of Cavaliers Impurs, a new creation presented in fall 23 in HAU Berlin and Théâtre National de Bretagne where Latifa is an associate artist since 2021.

Nadia Lauro

Nadia Lauro, As a visual artist and set designer, Nadia Lauro has been developing her work for several decades in various contexts (scenic spaces, landscape architectures, museums). She has conceived set designs, environments, and visual installations with strong dramaturgical power, thus generating new ways of seeing and being together. Nadia Lauro has collaborated with the following international choreographers and performers: Vera Mantero, Benoît Lachambre, Frans Poesltra, Martin Belanger, Ami Garmon, Barbara Kraus, Emmanuelle Huynh, Fanny de Chaillé, Alain buffard, Antonija Livingstone, Latifa Laabissi, Jonathan Capdevielle , Laéticia Dosh, Zeena Parkins, Antonia Baehr, Yasmine Hugonnet, Marion Siéfert, Kate MacIntosh and with Jennifer Lacey with whom she co-authored numerous projects. She recieved a New York Dance and Performance Award (The Bessie) for her visual installation in $Shot (Lacey/Lauro/Parkins/Cornell). She has conceived the installations / performances: Tu montes, As Atletas, I hear voices, Garden of time developed in museums, theater houses, and art galleries in Europe, United States, Japan, and Korea.