Artist statement
Renaud Semper is a performer and creator of hybrid formats.
His choreographic works gravitate around themes intimately connected with territory, identity and origin and call upon a wide variety of professional and amateur artists to participate in performances for both traditional theatre and non conventional performance spaces. Self-taught, Renaud Semper has and continues to work in collaboration with various French and international personalities towards the constant investigation of new protean collective practices. Born in 1994 (Céret, Pyrénées-Orientales, France), Renaud has repeatedly fled from various academic studies and schools during his early years of artistic training. Since 2015 he has been based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with regular long stays in France.
Ever increasingly he explores the languages of contemporary dance and performance through his continued miseducation during the attendance of numerous courses and workshops in the two countries (Compañia Nacional de Danza Contemporánea de Argentina, Régine Chopinot, Pep Ramis/Maria Munoz, Agustina Sario, Leticia Mazur, Sylvain Huc, Frederic Jollivet).
In Argentina, he has been confronted with several works that deeply upset his conception of art. The mutations of identity in the era of globalization led him to be more and more interested in working towards the inclusion of amateur artists at the heart of his creations; since then, Renaud Semper establishes collective practical and theoretical experiences having as a central axis the body and its contemporary representations, questioning the Western principles of interculturality and the future of the francophone world through reflections on popular art, tradition/modernity and colonial epistemology.
Between 2016 and 2020, he created Décembre, a physical theatre show created in Buenos Aires; Déjà vu (tinku/barroco), a performance conceived between France, Argentina and Bolivia in conjunction with a Bolivian indigenous dancer and an Argentine baroque dancer; and Cartographies (im)possibles, created with eight teenage refugees from Sub-Saharan Africa in Perpignan, France. In both France and Argentina he has collaborated on other projects with many multidisciplinary artists such as Julien Gosselin, Nicolas Stemman, Emilio García Wehbi and Maricel Alvarez, Cristian Miño and Michaela Bottinger, Lucia Nacht, Gabriela Demonte, Felipe Hirschfeldt, Ignacio Bartolone. Most recently he has worked with, in Argentina, Maik Ghioldi, Carlos Herrera and Sofia Kauer; and in France Séverine Fontaine (director), Lucie Prod’homme (composer) and Paula Noé Murphy, sister to the film director Gaspar Noé (visual artist).
In July 2021, he was selected for the MARSLAB, the artistic laboratory research of the Marseille 2021 Performing arts festival, supervised by Hildegard de Vuyst and Alain Platel (les Ballets C de la B).
Renaud has also been working in close partnership with the French National Education system for several years and has developed artistic projects in cooperation with numerous educational institutions. Each year, he visits schools with underprivileged students and designs various choreographic experiences for them.