Mathilde Monnier

After a career as a performer, Mathilde Monnier started choreographing 1984, alternating between group pieces, solos and duets. From one piece to the next, she defies expectations with a constantly renewed body of work. Her appointment as director of the ICI-CCN Montpellier in 1994 marked the beginning of a period of openness to other artistic fields, as well as active reflection on the management of an institutional venue and ways to share the dance. Her pieces – Pour Antigone, Déroutes, Les lieux de là, Surrogate Cities, Soapera, etc. – play on the deconstruction of choreographic composition and the language of dance, and have been performed on international stages and festivals. Mathilde Monnier directed the ICI-CCN Montpellier from 1994 to 2013. From January to June 2019, Mathilde Monnier was then appointed at the head of the CN D, which she insisted should be an art center for dance, reaffirming that dance is the place of indiscipline par excellence, appropriating and inventing ever fruitful and new relationships with other artistic fields. 

dancing, talking 

“ For this workshop, I’d like to explore the direct relationship between dance and text, or to put it another way, between a moving body and a spoken text. This is work I began several years ago, most recently with the piece Please please please I did with La Ribot and Tiago Rodrigues, and then with Black Lights. During Camping, I’ll be continuing my investigation into the relationship between these two approaches to language – that of the body and that of text. How can these two mediums remain active and powerful without giving more attention to one form at the expense of the other? How can they interact, overlap and not cancel each other out? How can one body carry and perform two activities at the same time on an equal footing? We will try to bring together these mediums, which are usually separate entities, to produce forms in which physical and verbal languages are independent but linked to the same performative body. We’ll also do exercises to prepare and experiment with this relationship. Participants must bring one or more texts that interest them, that they’d like to delve into, so that we can explore what is at stake in these possible interweavings.” Mathilde Monnier