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The project aims to create a digital and notational archive of the work of Matt Mattox, a leading figure in jazz dance in Europe and the United States, and to collect testimonies by reaching out to those who encountered his method at various times between 1960 and 2010. The project focuses on the little-known work of Matt Mattox, particularly on the development of his movement vocabulary through the sequence of his exercises (his “barre”), its constants and variations, and how they have evolved, in order to document the traces he has left on dancers’ bodies and on the current choreographic lan…

Developed in collaboration with Ana Bigotte Vieira, a historian and specialist in performance studies, the project aims to create a series of timelines that seek to highlight connections between key events of the 20th and 21st centuries related to the transformations of Portuguese society and choreographic discourse in the emergence of dance. By organizing the collected material into five broad descriptive categories (works, educators, and major narratives in the history of dance and art), the goal is to create a digital tool that will serve as the first retrospective analysis of dance as an a…

Recognizing the scarcity of scholarly work on hip hop (most of which is sociological) and drawing on a holistic, hybrid, and diasporic cultural approach (with reference to the work of Paul Gilroy), the project aims to strip away clichés and explore the aesthetics of hip-hop dance by describing the steps, figures, and movements, and categorizing them by skill level and age group, in the style of a “dance treatise.” The project involves filming dance sessions to provide content for instructional materials used in the state-certified hip-hop dance training program.

The project focuses on court ballet in Spain during the Golden Age. It examines this practice through three interrelated concepts: the body, the person, and the figure. It draws, on the one hand, on a vast collection of accounts of festivities; and, on the other hand, on a body of theoretical discourse (legal, ethical, medical, and poetic) that governs the practices of dance.

This research on the origins of the ball under Louis XIII—on “what it might have looked like”—reveals that the “French ball” spread throughout Europe under the name “branle,” alongside other dance forms such as the famous contredanse, danced in lines or squares. The ball incorporates elements that draw on Renaissance circle dances, Italian and Spanish influences, as well as refined couple dances (the courante réglée and the gaillarde). New movements—including the “en dehors,” the “élevé,” or movement on pointe, and the “plié”—along with rhythmic and spatial nuances, shaped a new physicality fo…

Launched to mark the bicentennial of the death of Jean-Étienne Despréaux (1748–1820)—dancer, dance master at the Royal Academy of Music, professor of dance and etiquette at the Paris Conservatory, and husband of Marie-Madeleine Guimard— this study of the manuscript of "Danse écrite, or La Terpsi-choro-graphie, or Nouvel Essay de Théorie de la danse" (1813) and of choreographed quadrilles for masked or formal balls during the reign of Napoleon I – works held in the Deshayes Collection at the National Library of France – aims to help fill a gap regarding a period (and an aesthetic) that remains …

Focusing on a dance created at the beginning of the last century—which was popular in the early decades of the 20th century both within the context of traditional flamenco and at dances and competitions—this analysis, developed using a situated (queer) historical approach, highlights some of the key issues in the debates surrounding flamenco orthodoxy while compiling an exhaustive corpus of musical, video, photographic, and textual archives covering the various performance contexts, and by reconstructing José Otero’s "garrotín" based on the choreographic score from his 1912 "Treatise on Dance"…

Drawing on sources that have been little studied or are difficult to access, this research focuses on a dance consisting of a single main step and its variations, deriving its originality from the different arm positions in which the two partners intertwine. Based on the structure of a square contradance typical in France as early as the mid-18th century, the allemande was described by Parisian and provincial dance masters (Jean Robert in Orléans in 1770, Brives in Toulouse in 1779) and gained fame both on the dance floor and on stage. A detailed practical analysis of the dance is compared wit…

This exploration of artistic affinities and connections between the French writer Joë Bousquet, the Japanese choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata, and the Franco-German painter, photographer, and sculptor Hans Bellmer revolves around the concepts of injury, illness, fragility, and the obscure body—between life and death, animate and inanimate, deformed and dislocated, morbid and erotic. In doing so, the project maps out a constellation of artistic approaches that are in dialogue with or in tension against Surrealism, including those of Georges Bataille, Antonin Artaud, Max Ernst, Jean Genet, and Fri…

This study, conducted among French-speaking contemporary dancers aged 40 and older, examines the relationship between the experience of time and the sense of presence. Motivated by the question, “What are the capabilities of language to express the memory of a sensory experience?”, it examines modes of expression that generate a body of knowledge related to the act of dance itself, and proposes a dialogue between this empirical material and theoretical texts, in particular, "Thought and Movement" by Henri Bergson and "The Sense of Self: A History of the Perception of the Body, 16th–20th Centur…

This research focuses on secular dances, exploring the competitive aspect of dexterity that plays out among women. While gathering the dancers’ testimonies, it aims to analyze, using Laban notation, the specific physical skills required by each of these dances. This research focuses on secular dances, reconstructing them. In doing so, the project maps out “pelvic dances”: specifically, the Mahoran mbiwi, the Cape Verdean batuka, the Réunionese séga and maloya, and, beyond these, the Baka dances, the Puno dances, the Mayottean debaa, and the Mozambican tufo.

Building on the creation of a piece based on a reinterpretation of three solos by Ruth Saint Denis and group pieces by Ted Shawn (1906–1935), this filmed study gathers and weaves together the testimonies of the piece’s performers—Sherwood Chen, Ghyslaine Gau, Nitsan Margaliot, Calixto Neto, Pol Pi, and Cécile Proust—with the perspectives of scholars grounded in a tradition of critical thought, particularly from the Anglo-Saxon tradition —Homi K. Bhabha, Anne Décoret-Ahiha, Jane C. Desmond, Fabiana Ex-Souza, Federica Fratagnoli, Julia L. Foulkes, Olivia Gazalé, Olivier Marbœuf, and Rodney Willi…