Sans collier, Physiographie d’existences
Choreographer and performer: Louise Bédard
Playwright: Angélique Willkie
Dramaturg: Anne Thériault
Composer: Diane Labrosse
Set designer: Marilène Bastien
Lighting designer: Lucie Bazzo
Rehearsal director: Scott McCabe
Make-up artist: Angelo Barsetti
Costume: Anna Duverne
Production manager: Pier-Luc Legault
Production: Louise Bédard Danse
Coproduction: La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines
Louise Bédard Danse is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts de Montréal.
This project was also made possible thanks to the financial support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
Special thanks to Olivier Bertrand and the entire La Chapelle team.
The company has benefited from creation residencies at Agora de la danse, Place des Arts, Centre d’art Diane-Dufresne, and Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal. Danse K par K, Furies Festival de danse contemporaine, Circuit-Est choreographic centre, Festival Quartiers Danses. Agence Roger Roger.
Sans collier, Physiographie d’existences
During the pandemic’s isolation, choreographer and dancer Louise Bédard began taking photographs of herself, creating a series of self-portraits that became more than just images: they became thresholds to other existences.
From this photographic corpus, gradually emerged the faces and bodies of different women – some real, some imaginary – who found their space of manifestation in the artist’s body. Bédard becomes a living medium, lending her physicality to female presences that bring with them stories of transformation and fragility.
These women, long deprived of visibility, claim the right to exist scenically through performance. The mature body of the artist becomes a territory of encounter, a space where different identities can finally leave their mark.
Guided by the words and sensitivity of Clarice Lispector – a Brazilian writer known for exploring female interiority – Bédard constructs a true physiography of existences: a corporeal mapping of lives, desires and memories that take shape and presence on stage. A work that transforms autobiography into chorality, isolation into encounter, static photography into a pulsating dance of life
Louise Bédard Danse
Based in Montréal, Québec (CAN), Louise Bédard is a renowned choreographer who founded the Louise Bédard Danse company in 1990. Driven by a passion for movement, space and the tenuous thread that keeps us in a perpetual state of suspension and mooring, she delivers a sensitive and luminous dance with veracity and humility.
Louise has danced for several choreographers in Montreal, enriching her career with forays into performance, theatre, and film. Creation, where she combines knowledge and discovery, remains a fertile field of exploration for her.
Her path has brought her closer to the essence of gesture, that which frees her imagination and expresses strength and fragility. Her choreographic signature is hailed for its finesse, opening spaces of subjectivity and intimate expression.
In 2018, Louise Bédard received the Performer of the Year Award at the Prix de la danse de Montréal, highlighting her exceptional contribution. In 2025, she celebrates 35 years with her company, continuing a career marked by daring and originality.
Atlas of Sounds
Screenplay, research, recordings and stage performance: Ludomir Franczak
Loops, audio mix and mastering: Marcin Dymiter
Production: Teatr Szwalnia / Łódz
Atlas of Sounds
“Atlas of Sounds” is a constantly evolving and expanding collection of soundscapes. I explore the audiosphere of various places, engaging with both audible and hidden or imaginary phenomena.
The project is inspired by a belief once shared by Guglielmo Marconi, who studied sound waves that he believed were “recorded” in the air. Marconi was convinced that everything ever spoken on Earth still exists around us; we simply need a receiver sensitive enough to capture the sounds of the past.
This notion opens up new ways of understanding the audiosphere, encouraging us to think of sound not only as something we hear, but also as something imagined, remembered, or intuited. It allows for the construction of imaginary landscapes deeply connected to specific places, so that the performance transforms with each new location in which it is staged.
“Atlas of Sounds” is both an artist-led research project and a performative piece grounded in a continuously shifting archive of stories, all connected by a shared focus on sound. It reveals private worlds, bizarre collections, and impossible archives.
Each story follows its tempo and unfolds through different narrative strategies. The audience travels across time and space, listening to the Earth’s crust as it holds the traces and remains of our ancestors.
Ludomir Franczak
Based in Lublin (POL), anti-disciplinary artist and researcher working in visual arts, performance and theatre. His works are presented in theatres, galleries, public spaces, and festivals. He cooperates with musicians (Marcin Dymiter, Robert Curgenven, Robert Piotrowicz), visual artists (Magdalena Franczak, Sebastian Buczek), and theatres (Schaubude/Berlin, Cross Attic/Prague, TATWERK/Berlin, Szwalnia/Lodz).
Member of the collective creating the Polish exhibition at the Prague Quadriennale 2023. His primary focus is on issues of memory, identity and ecological activism. Through intermedia actions, he creates complex projects using visual and sound arts, history or literature. He is the author of several artistic publications and audio works. He is also active as a curator and cultural expert.
With the support of
Natural Bread
Written, directed, and performed by: Yoonhwan Jeon
Producer: Jisun Park
Sound design: Kayip
Subtitle Operator: Minji Kang Yoon
Produced by: AND Theatre
Natural Bread
Due to economic problems, a poor artist arrives on Gangwhado Island and becomes a failed cryptocurrency investor, forced to participate in the crazy Bitcoin investment trend fueled by neoliberalism.
Natural Bread integrates everyday domestic activities typical of Korean society – baking bread and drinking traditional Korean rice wine – with work activities, including investing in Bitcoin, in its natural flow. In the background, a screen shows the ever-changing movement of the Bitcoin price chart, while Jeon Yoon Hwan invests in real time. To recover the money he lost by investing in Bitcoin, he uses the fee he received for his performance by investing in cryptocurrency again.
This irrational act goes beyond the canons of safe investment, precisely because of its highly unstable rate of return. The performance finds its place on stage and screen, opening up a reflection on the value of an artist’s life without support in this era, between precariousness and self-knowledge.
Yoonhwan Jeon/ AND Theatre
Based in Seoul / Incheon (KOR), Jeon Yoon Hwan and AND Theatre follow the contemporary aspects of documentary plays and, at the same time, consider various theatre methodologies to mediate between fiction and reality. Jeon Yoon Hwan has been experimenting with documentary plays by integrating multiple forms of acts such as autobiographical, soliloquy, meta, place-specific, audience-participating, and immersive plays. Jeon Yoon Hwan has persistently created plays to question contemporary capitalist society. He reflects upon his experience of living in a world full of absurdity and contradiction, where one could become the one who ridicules and simultaneously become the target for ridicule.
facebook.com/yoonhwan.jeon
instagram.com/jeonyoonhwan
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Coro. Una specie di popolo
By and with: Amalia Franco
Music: Fabio Orsi
Stagecraft: Gianluca Vigone
Puppets: Amalia Franco
Co-production: Lavorare Stanca_VersoSud
Support and residency: RAMDAM, UN CENTRE D’ART and Botti du Shcoggiu
Project supported by: European Union and Goethe-Institut
Coro. Una specie di popolo
In the interweaving of dance, object theatre, and language, the artist explores the Chorus as a physical, emotional, and cognitive entity.
In its most immediate manifestation, the Chorus appears as a peaceful throng of puppets, devoted to a continuous and never-identical movement of rising and falling. A kind of people, where physical form slowly dissolves into sentiment, yet eternal, without history, like angels or the plebeian masses.
The creatures of the Chorus embody a shared emotion: a point of convergence between subtle thought and the manifestation of matter. The cube becomes the space of this encounter — a space within a space, a theatre within a theatre; at once artifice, hut, cosmological object, Platonic solid, and theatrical machine animating figures into motion.
Amid the comings and goings between physical, emotional, and conceptual forms — between the visible and the invisible, the one and the many, the celestial and the earthly — we are guided by the Poet, or the Buffoon: a kind of limping Charon, crossing this dense and material underworld.
Amalia Franco
Based in Taranto and Torino (ITA), she is an independent artist whose research explores the intersections between dance and figure theatre, creating hybrid puppets and handmade masks. Her work extends beyond the performance itself, rooted in a laborious and ongoing relationship with materials before and after the stage.
Her creative process unfolds through strategies of juxtaposition, accumulation, improvisation, and secretion, adapting to each work’s requirements. Her projects include Exercises to Disappear, Unique Body (with Maurice Quartet), Triptych, Cantillations (with Moscatelli and Frana), Letting Go Gracefully, and Will You Promise Me a Dance. (with Di Crescenzo and Ceccobelli).
She has been invited to present her work at numerous festivals, theatres, and institutions, including: Museo degli Uffizi, Anima If, Kilowatt Festival, Altofest, Marta – Museo Archeologico, FuoriFormato, Mirabilia, Tdanse, Teatri di Vita, Officine Caos, Immagini dall’Interno, Le Voci dell’Anima, VersoSud, Teatro dello Scompiglio, Laboratori Permanenti, Settimo Cielo, Teatro della Contraddizione, among others.
Psychoanalysis of Money
Concept & Performance: Johanna Herschel and Felix Falczyk
Production by: Felix Falczk and Johanna Herschel
Co-production with: Implantieren Festival 2024
Funded by: Cultural Office of the City of Frankfurt am Main and the Hessian Ministry of Science and Research, Culture and Art.
The research phase of the work has been supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media within the program NEUSTART KULTUR #TakeHeart Residency Grant in cooperation with Theater im Ballsaal Bonn and Mousonturm Frankfurt.
Psychoanalysis of Money
Money evokes a wide range of emotions and affects. It is an object of fixation and projection, a source of everyday neurosis, and a means of fulfilling desires. It shapes our social interactions down to the smallest detail.
In “The Psychoanalysis of Money”, we seek to reverse the logic of money itself. Through a process of analysis, participants explore the deep structures of the money complex.
Together, we examine money as a mechanism for repressing social dependencies, and we confront the unconscious dimensions of monetary life.
Through speculative exercises, we interrogate the origins of money and search for new ways of coming together.
Our everyday and seemingly natural use of money is critically examined. Money becomes a tool for therapy.
Deepfake Situations
Based in Berlin (DEU), under the label Deepfake Situations, Felix Falczyk and Johanna Herschel work on strategies and tactics for the misappropriation of (everyday) situations, with the goal of asking about the foundations of how we come together. Together with the audience, they construct situations in which new behaviors are rehearsed, unlearned or simulated.
As interdisciplinary experimental arrangements their works explore the boundaries of theatre, visual arts and social choreography, a.o. at the Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje (NMK), Ballhaus Ost Berlin, Mousonturm Frankfurt, International Schiller Days at National Theatre Mannheim, zeitraumexit Mannheim, Confluence Festival Stockholm (SE), Zeitzeug Festival Bochum, ARENA Festival Erlangen and TanzArt Gießen. Lectures and artistic research at the Collaborative Research Centre “Intervening Arts”, New Centre for Research & Practice (US) and the School for Politics & Critique (NMK).
The body stuttering at the proximity of a future sign
Idea, direction and performer: Valeria Polorena
Musical composition and live music: Sebastian Morell
Awards: Theater Festival in Unexpected Spaces in Buenos Aires Festival Perpretacions Barcelona
Residence: Centre Civic San Martí, Nunart, Nau Ivanow
Open Studio: Oda a la mecerie Brussels, L´arreplegada Girona, Vallecas Danza Madrid
The body stuttering at the proximity of a future sign
“An exploration of the multiplicity of identities that inhabit our bodies. A ritual where, through a journey of sound and movement, the street, the party, the carnival, and the clubs emerge. An invitation to blur the boundaries between intimacy and exposure, the chiaroscuro of our stories, the territory, our origins, desires, influences, and our demons”.
This piece reconstructs traditional dances and music through the lens of contemporary techniques. We pursue transformation without erasing tradition, searching for new possibilities for expression.
It attempts to bridge popular and contemporary languages, poised on the threshold of a new aesthetic.
We seek to animate these representative forms with the emotional urgency of the present, an experience that will collectively transcend time and immerse us in an anachronistic ritual.
Valeria Polorena and Sebastian Morell
Based in Barcelona (ESP), Valeria is a dancer, teacher, choreographer, and director. She has presented her work at festivals such as the Bienal de Arte Joven, FIBA, and Theatre San Martín Festival CCR. She has worked with choreographers such as Mathilde Monnier, David Wampach, and Alexandra Pirici. She has received various scholarships and support for her projects, including the artist-in-residence program at the National Dance Centre, CN D Paris, and the Tic Tac Art Centre residency.
Sebastian is a composer and musical performer, specialising in working with teams of artists and producers in diverse fields such as the performing arts, film and popular music. Among his most recent works are the original music compositions for “Esto no es un simulacro” (Biennial of Young Art Buenos Aires), “Yo es multitud” (San Martín Theater, CCR), “Access to the Tangible” (CCK, MIAC Brazil), and “Bots” (Artlab).
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instagram.com/valepolorena
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instagram.com/seba.morell
(Sans) Ordre
Concept and performance – Polina Fenko
With
Field recordings Archive from Marina Karpova
Recorded voices of the guests:
Sonara Lunara (astrologist)
Harriet Roberts (menstrual health educator and embryologist)
Anonymous (criminologist)
Residency support: Lake studios, Tanzfabrik.
Venues: 4bid gallery, New Fears gallery.
(Sans) Ordre
Performance (Sans) Ordre opens a space for reflection on an alternative history of choreography that originates in the practice of tracking the human body. Meandering through various documents that illustrate different methods of movement notation, the choreographic appears deeply linked to the militaristic, particularly in its techniques of capturing and disciplining the body. Across the centuries, both war and dance have engaged with recording movement.
Through scores, they have transcribed collective and personal gestures and rehearsed and re-enacted them.
How might these parallels challenge our preconceptions, inviting us to reflect on the intersections between discipline and creativity, regimentation and freedom?
This performance draws connections between criminology, astrology, and embryology through speculative research methods and the recurring patterns found in choreographic and militaristic scores.
It questions our perception of choreography, embracing doubt, the free flow of attention, irony, and a dreamer’s mind, as a way to collectively meditate on how choreography might function differently if we consider it a practice of world-making.
Polina Fenko
Based in Berlin (DEU), born in Saint-Petersburg, Polina Fenko, born in 1997, is a dance artist and dance dramaturge based in Berlin, originally from Saint-Petersburg.
Through her choreographic and dramaturgical practices, Polina researches the relationship between social choreography, somatechnics, and perceptual politics. Her current research focuses on the intersection of military and choreographic scores with surveillance technologies explored through experimental methodologies of documentary choreography.
Driven by her interest in plural forms and ideologies of knowledge production, she organises performative conversations, workshops, and lecture performances that explore alternative forms of coexistence and ways of relating to each other while rethinking the notion of the social.
Amongst many collaborations with individual artists, Polina worked as a dramaturg for the TanzTage Festival at Sophiensæle, Potsdamtage, and ICK Amsterdam.
She has performed in works by Simone Forti, Alexandra Pirici, Kiori Sherwood-Kawai, and Kirill Savchenkov, among others. Her works have been presented at various festivals and performance venues in Amsterdam (W139, 4bid gallery, Kunstkapel), Turin (Lavanderia a Vapore), Berlin (Lake studios, New Fears gallery, Tanzfabrik), and Vienna (ImPulsTanz).
Before Night Falls
Artistic Direction & Choreography: Delerci Daniela
Created and performed by: Ahmed Gharreb, Mostafa Bassem, Ziad Wallace, Unique
Performed by: Salvatore Cataldo, Toto, Mohand Qader
Dramaturgy: Delerci Daniela
Sound & Voice Design: Mohammed Abo El Naga (Bonga)
Voice credits: Nouman Malik, Costas Roco, Mostafa Bassem, Simon Donnelly
Lighting Design: Haley Yiu
Production Manager: Ezzat Ismail
Co-Productions & Support
Select works by DCollective have been developed in collaboration with institutions and festivals across Egypt and Europe, including: Contemporary Dance Night 2023 and 2024 Yalla Studio
Awards & Recognition: WomenCinemakers Biennale (2024–2025) Berlin Al Ard Film Festival (2025) Italy
Acknowledgments: DCollective expresses deep gratitude to Ahmed Ghareeb, Ziad Wallace, Unique and Mostafa Bassem who share their stories and inspire every step of the process. Special thanks to Ezzat and Yalla Studio for his unwavering ongoing creative support, before and after the creation.
Before Night Falls
“Before Night Falls” explores masculinity through an Egyptian lens. It reveals the tensions between cultural identity, societal expectations, and interpersonal relationships.
Set in a living room—a symbolic space of both comfort and confrontation—the piece follows four male performers as they navigate inherited roles, vulnerability, and strength.
Through movement, spoken word in Arabic and English, and the city as a living backdrop, “Before Night Falls” interrogates what it means to be a man today. The work invites the audience into an intimate, fragile space where masculinity can be reimagined—not as performance, but as shared human experience—encouraging collective reflection and dialogue.
DCollective
Based in London (GBR), DCollective is a contemporary dance collective founded in 2024 by choreographer Delerci Daniela.
The collective is driven by a bold artistic vision: to create socially resonant performances that speak to themes of identity.
Blending movement, voice, and visual storytelling, DCollective crafts immersive experiences that challenge conventional narratives and invite audiences into spaces of vulnerability, reflection, and connection with different realities. Their work often emerges from deep engagement with communities, transforming lived stories into choreography. Dedicated to innovation, collaboration, and cultural exchange, DCollective is reshaping the landscape of contemporary storytelling. Through performances, workshops, and interdisciplinary projects, the collective empowers underrepresented voices and opens new pathways for dialogue across borders and generations.
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instagram.com/delercidaniela/
Courir à sa ruine
By and with: Simona Rossi
Assistant and outside look: Matthieu Blond
A co-production: Louma/ Ccn Nantes.
With the support of Honolulu Nantes
Observer: Michele Castelli
Courir à sa ruine
“In the Betamax of life, there is no rewind button,” wrote Nam June Paik. And yet, to build, one must first dig.
This work emerges from an excavation—the retrieval of a videotape on which, years ago, I spoke casually about a fragment of my personal artistic history, specifically about a possible form of choreography outside its conventional context.
I spoke of two bodies, not virtuoso ones, crossed by the choice to spend a certain amount of time standing. Of standing as a possible form of dance. And of resistance.
Choosing a specific point in space and remaining there for a while: a creative act, a motion of freedom and subversion, searching for possible alternatives despite inevitable failure.
A defence of nonsense, as an act of faith.
Simona Rossi
Based in Rome (ITA), working between Italy and France, Simona Rossi is an independent researcher who begins with dance to venture into other territories.
She has appropriated the biographies of others who share her name to co-create performances in private apartments, led visitors through the Cinecittà studios, and developed workshops for spectators to reflect on cinema through the body.
She has danced for Kinkaleri, Barokthegreat, Ambra Senatore, and Loïc Touzé and has long been engaged with Yasmine Hugonnet’s work, first as a dancer, then as an assistant and stage translator.