AINA ALEGRE
About Aina Alegre
Aina Alegre is a choreographer, a dancer and a performer. After a multidisciplinary training in dance, theater and music in Barcelona, she joined the CNDC in Angers in 2007 where she developped choreographic objects constructed from different media: pieces for the stage and performances in hybrid spaces. In 2014, she founded the STUDIO FICTIF company in Paris in order to support her projects and creations. Since then, her work has beeń presented in various countries including Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, Greece, Switzerland, Germany, Peru or Romania. Since 2023, Aina Alegre is co-director at Choreographic National Center of Grenoble.
What are the main focuses and questions in your work? / Short description
Aina Alegre embraces choreographic creation as a means of opening up imaginary worlds around the body. Influenced by fiction as both genre and practice, her work explores the body in plastic environments, and her choreographic writing is closely linked to rhythm and music. Her work also focuses on notions of memory and the anthropology of gesture.
Alongside her stage projects, since 2018 she has been setting up the research and performance project STUDIES, with which she encounters people and territories and collects stories around practices and dances linked to the gestures of hammering and striking. She works on the theme of memory and archiving, using the spoken word as a choreographic driving force.
What project will you be working on during your residency?
In my work, there's always a need to question and revisit the first impulses that lead us to get involved in dance. I endeavor to observe the "root gestures" of certain pre-existing dances. I don't try to reproduce them, but rather to understand them and be moved by the energy that inhabits them, so as to be able to propose new forms of representation.
As a blend of solos, duets and group moments, FUGACES follows on from THIS IS NOT (an act of love & resistance) and SWING-MOTOR, a commission for the Young Ballet of the CNSMD of Lyon. Here, the group is once again the driving force behind the choreography. We're in a kind of ballroom, an arena, to summon up an electric and percussive energy. A writing of gestures and space where bodies will propel themselves, throw themselves into the dance, swing through steps, turns, jumps and contaminate themselves in percussive rhythms played live.
I'm in the process of furthering my research into the possible relationship between dance and music, with instrumentalists on stage. This time, it will be a percussionist-drummer.
This project also offers a cross-over of artistic languages. In FUGACES, I want to invoke the dances of bailaora Carmen Amaya through a free interpretation and give visibilitý to this figure who is part of the heritage and has contributed to the evolution of the art of flamenco and dance in general. A female dancer who, through her approach and her politico-cultural context, remains a contemporary voice.
What has always fascinated me about her and flamenco is that it's first and foremost about dances, I'd say, of anthropological and communal survival, practiced in particular by gypsy communities. A kind of expression of the existence of an oppressed people. An art that has also evolved, been shared, transmitted and hybridized... In this idea of hybridization of languages, and far from wishing to reproduce Carmen Amaya's dance, I'm rather looking to expand our subjective interpretations. The choreography will be based on textual and video archives. We're going to activate the idea of interpreting instead of speculating, transmitting, translating and reconstruct her dance through our contemporary practices, but free from the technique and style of flamenco.
Continuing my research and obsession with bodies that strike, that set themselves in rhythm, that produce through their dance a form of internal music, I weave here a geometric dance language that's hard-hitting, fast-paced and lightning-fast, with great suspensions. A dance that is both noisy and silent. We're going to make the space vibrate through light, music and rhythm, so that the bodies become charged, set themselves in motion, rebel and become energy channels.
