© Oliana Lassalle
Artist statement
My artistic field is hybrid. My social background, my childhood, and teenage years in a small town, as well as working many jobs, have allowed me to cross several social fields and cultures, several living environments, to live sometimes a feeling of non-belonging, of disconnect. Without being torn apart, I was displaced, always on the move. These experiences extended my tastes and knowledge. The fact that these experiences were not always in the artistic world led me to think that the theatrical, stage field sometimes forgot to consider or look in certain directions.
I studied art history and performing arts in Toulouse and Paris. I practiced contemporary dance for 20 years and attended workshops in National Center for Contemporary Dance in Toulouse with Cie Maguy Marin, Cie Rosas, Nadia Beugre, Yuri Konjar, Sofia Diaz and Victor Ortiz… I was assistant director for several years with Laurent Pelly and Agathe Mélinand at the Théâtre National de Toulouse. Artistic director of the Juste Ici Company, I created in 2014 a first dance play Horla(s) Repas de Famille / Horla(s) Family Meal, a hybrid dance-theater play about family, relationships, conflicts and secrets. During the creating process the company gave workshops in a young worker’s home.
In 2017-2018 I was student in the Master of Professional Direction and Dramaturgy of the University of Paris-Nanterre. I worked with David Lescot, Kasia Torz and Gisèle Vienne, Marie-Christine Soma, Agnès Bourgeois and Ludovic Fouquet and presented my work at “La Nuit des Idées”, in the National Dance Center and in the Festival “Mondes Possibles” at Theatre Nanterre-Amandiers co-organized by Camille Louis. During this year I also staged readings during the European Dramaturgical Forum with students actors of the Strasbourg National Theatre in Avignon’s IN Festival and met several European writers and translators. I also assisted Sanja Mitrovic, a Serbian director working in Belgium for the play My Revolution is Better Than Yours created in May 2018 at the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers. An aesthetic shift connected with what I wanted to do : working on real fact and theatrical aesthetics.
Back in Toulouse, I decided to create a new play named WERFEN (to throw in German) staging protesters’ gestures and testimonies, questioning the prejudices on protesting people. This play will be released in May 2022 at RING Scène Périphérique in Toulouse and also, in a public space: in front Alban Minville’s Cultural Center in Jun 2022. In 2019, I was invited by Kelina Gotman (Pr at the Royal College of London) to the Frankfort Performing Art Festival to give choreographic workshops and a lecture about struggling movement. In 2021 I was a performer in a European mobility project about women in public space at night (Projet Nyctalope, Compagnie Le Polymorphe) performing in the streets of Helsinki.
My research around the movement is increasingly directed towards so-called “non-choreographic” movements such as sports gestures. With the artists of the Company, in 2020-2021 we developed a participative contemporary dance project with sports amateurs named La Beauté des Gestes/ Gesture’s Beauty. It won a Toulouse Metropole Fund and received the support of l’Usine National Center for Art in Public Spaces. It was created in peripheric towns with their inhabitants and professional dancers, blurring the lines between their practices by constantly asking ourselves: How do you work with people without seeing yourself as the knowledgeable person who will bring culture and art? How to co create and constantly respect people’s consent? How to listen to people deeply when you work with them? People from 12 years to 60 brought their knowledge about their sports movements and shared their experience and we created Connections between each other which seemed deeply important after the pandemics. This vocabulary was the choreographic material of the play.
Juste Ici also developed several projects in schools with youngsters from the countryside, creating a performance about women’s rights evolutions and struggling. They also were involved in sharing their own knowledge about movement.
I look around the bodies, their stories, and practices, around the triviality of gestures. I also listen to stories and the testimonies of the people we meet and invite non artist people to testify on stage, always carrying about consent and ethics. For four years my work is about people and practices which are considered aside contemporary dance field, which are seen as “ig-noble” (as in not noble). I also like to create artistic projects in different places and fields: sports equipment, theater, street, public spaces. Because I am strongly convinced that art can be everywhere, that it’s way to create strong bonds with people and to be inclusive. That’s why, among those projects we keep searching for age, gender, social background, and cultural inclusivity.