ILT - Workshop with choreograph Catherine Dreyfuss
Embodying Transformation through Dance and Scenography
- Workshop by Catherine Dreyfus.
Led by French choreographer Catherine Dreyfus, this workshop is designed for professional artists and students. It offers an immersive experience at the heart of a creative process, giving participants the opportunity to discover and experiment with the choreographer’s artistic approach.
The workshop is presented in a close collaboration with ILT Festival and ILT Academy. We are grateful for this generous collaboration. Thank you Malene Cathrine Pedersen and her brilliant team. Check out the full artistic program at International performing arts festival in Aarhus.
Catherine Dreyfus explores reality with distance, dreamlike elements, and humor. Her creations stem from a common impulse: questioning how encounters with the Other transform us and allow us to be reborn into ourselves.
Through characters with distinctive physical traits, she delves into a movement language where the body's strangeness interacts with a deeply theatrical dance. Her choreographic writing is characterized by a unique musical grammar and a distinct rhythmic structure. Scenography plays a crucial role in her work, particularly through the confrontation of the body with physical materials.
For Le Mensonge, she drew inspiration from the eponymous book to shape the entire creative process, encompassing choreography, dramaturgy, costumes, music, and scenography.
Coming from diverse artistic backgrounds, participants will have the opportunity to explore each stage of this approach, enriching their own practice and broadening their perspective on choreographic creation.
About Le Mensonge (The Lie)
Le Mensonge is the delicate story of a little girl who lied at the dinner table one evening. When she enters her bedroom, she finds her lie in the form of a red circle. When she wakes up the next morning, it’s still there, insistent and indelible, and when she goes to bed at night, it’s still there. As the days go by, the circle swells and multiplies, invading her space and even preventing her from breathing properly.
We follow the little girl’s point of view, plunging into her mental space, where a small grain of sand becomes a mountain. It’s an immersion in her inner world, in her swirling obsession full of poisonous mushrooms, dreams, hallucinations, and nightmares. We won’t know a single word of this lie. It’s between him and her, but it could be between all the liars and all the lies in the world...
Le Mensonge is aimed at all audiences, adults and children alike. This has always been the way I’ve conceived my shows: offering various reading grids to reach as many people as possible, provoking discussion, and bringing together the general and the intimate. Based on a narrative structure with the body as support, free interpretation can blossom. Everyone can build their own story within a common dramatic thread. This show is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking.
At the age of 20, Catherine Dreyfuss began her career as a performer in France and abroad. She has danced for Odile Duboc, Simone Sandroni - Déjà Donné Co, Nathalie Pernette, Alain Imbert, Micha Purucker, Sosana Marcelino, Les Filles D’Aplomb, Crescendo Co. Nourished by these encounters, she developed her own work alongside her tours.
In 2008, she founded the Act2 company, continuing to assert her artistic personality and aesthetic quest.
Catherine Dreyfuss approaches reality with distance, poetry, and humor. The imaginary bodies, staging, lighting, set design, and music all work in the same direction, transporting us into a singular universe. The dancers embody the movement, seeking its substance in the features of unusual, offbeat characters and bodies borrowed from Tati, Miyazaki, and others.
Her choreographic writing is rooted in a musical grammar, a tempo, and a very specific rhythmic relationship. She likes to confront the body with physical matter. Set design plays a vital role in her world. The set is seen as a performer, an essential partner in the service of the dance. She feeds her research by confronting her work with other artists and different audiences (amateur and professional) and accompanies the broadcasting of her shows with a significant amount of local work and awareness-raising for all audiences.
In 15 years, she has created 9 choreographic works for the Act2 company, which are currently in the repertoire.
