Miscellaneous

Teacher

Zoë Demoustier

Why shouldn't we consider more deeply contemporary dance's ability to tell stories, instead of relying solely on visual forms that tend toward abstraction? For the young Belgian choreographer and performer Zoë Demoustier, who has worked with prestigious labels such as Ultima Vez, this is not just an aesthetic choice, but a potential strategy for making dance accessible to new audiences: "Images and emotions from everyday life around us, from our collective archive, can be something that more people recognize and therefore find easier to access."

Demoustier's reliance on the narrative potential of the body goes back to her first solo piece, Unfolding an Archive, in which she moves between her own memories of her absent father during his deployments as a war photographer, and media archival material from conflict regions. She develops this theme further in What Remains, which creates encounters between dancers approaching the end of their lives and children. Regarding her upcoming project Hear the Silence, which explores the boundaries of music and dance as a form of resistance and connection in uncertain times, she says: "Maybe we need to be together. Maybe we need to reach out to each other. Maybe we need to try to dance together, sing together, breathe together, be silent together. That could be something we can do as theater makers today."

Although she is only 30 years old, Zoë Demoustier has been teaching for almost 15 years: "For me, the main goal of teaching is to help people find their language. That was also the most important thing for me during my own training." The most important aspect of teaching, she says, is communication and finding the right words. The irony that she actually turned to dance to express herself through movement rather than language has not been lost on her, as she notes with a laugh during the conversation. As part of the "Tanzwerkstatt Europa", Zoë Demoustier will be giving a workshop based on the blend of contemporary dance and mime corporel. The workshop will offer tools and techniques for finding one's own "Point Zero", "the natural starting point for any communication with one's own body and the bodies of others."

Plamen Harmandjiev

"From Intention to Embodiment: Storytelling through Movement and Presence", 11–15 August; www.jointadventures.net