Pol Pi &
Tiphaine Besnard

A late-bloomer in dance, a musician since his early childhood and a choreographer-researcher, Pol Pi is a transmasculine Brazilian dance artist, who has been based in France since 2013. With the No Drama company, Pol Pi has created the soli ECCE (H)OMO (2017), ALEXANDRE (2018), ME TOO, GALATÉE (2018), LÀ (2019), Schönheit ist Nebensache 

ou la beauté s’avère accessoire (2021) and La grotte (2024), as well as the trio Daté-e-s (2020) and the quartet IN YOUR HEAD (2022 – in collaboration with the Berlin music ensemble Kaleidoskop). His work has been presented at numerous venues in France and abroad. He has worked with non-professional groups, medical professionals and social workers, the queer community, art schools and dance training courses. Pol Pi is currently interested in intuitive listening as a mode of creation, altered states of consciousness, care as an artistic practice and creation as an approach to care. He is currently learning to dance with horses near his home in the Dordogne. 

Tiphaine Besnard is a therapist, trained in Mindfulness, EMDR and Family Constellations. She holds a PhD in sociology, and has published three books on gender and sexuality. She is also a yoga instructor and has trained with the Durga’s Tiger school, which combines yoga, dance and shamanic practices, as a means of tuning in intuitively to one’s body, calling upon one’s self-healing capacities and envisaging creation as a tool for expression and transformation. Besnard has a close relationship with dance, mainly ballet. In 2007, she joined Alain and Françoise Chantraine’s Expression dance school, where she trained for seven years. Between 2011 and 2013, she took part in contemporary dance workshops with Tebby Ramasike and François Chaignaud. More recently, she has taken an interest in the discipline of authentic movement with Soraya Jorge, as a way of combining dance and a therapeutic approach. 

Intuition as a territory for artistic and therapeutic exploration; as sensitive listening to what is already there at every moment. Intuition as what often guides us in somatic practices and in those creative moments when we feel we’ve found something “right”. Intuition as a mode of listening used during magical practices convened by queer activist pagan communities. During this workshop, Pol Pi and Tiphaine Besnard invite us to delve into this heritage with them, and to practice performative devices centered on intuition as a mode of presence and creation, in order to build our own magical-political danced ritual together.