Alice Chauchat is a dance practitioner based in Berlin since 2001. Most of her activities revolve around dance and range from dancing to choreographing to teaching to supporting peers to making up frames for being and acting together to writing to pondering in practice on politics and ethics of togetherness in and outside a dance studio.
After studying in Lyon's C.N.S.M and at P.A.R.T.S., Brussels, she co-founded the collective B.D.C. together with Thomas Plischke, Martin Nachbar and Hendrik Laevens (1999-2001).
In 2001 Alice created the solo Quotation marks me, an attempt to simultaneously acknowledge the contradicting legacies (aesthetic and ideological) of Yvonne Rainer’s no manifesto and Doris Humphreys’ Art of Making Dances. Her duet Choreographies (2002) played with the gender performances of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in the musical Top Hat. A Number of Classics in the Age of Performance, created and performed in collaboration with Vera Knolle in 2003, unpacked the various meanings of the word “performance” while the joyful and affirmative J’aime, created with Anne Juren in 2004 on an original mix by DJ Assault, embraced the exchange of desires, voyeurism and narcissism implied in many dance performances, from a feminist perspective. Crystalll, created with Alix Eynaudi in 2005, over-identified with conventional modes of presentation of the female body in art, keeping the audience in the troublesome position of desiring while criticising the very same desire that is nurtured by the exposed structures. Building on Body-Mind Centering to initiate every movement from the breast area, The Breast Piece (praticable), created in 2008 with Frédéric Gies, confronted the materiality of the (female) body with the loads of representations it carries along. The Love Piece, created in 2007 in collaboration with Anna Achimovic, Nino Bokan, Pravdan Devlahović, Oliver Frljic, Zvonimir Kvesić, Ivana Pavlović, Ivana Roncević, Nina Sakić and Una Vizek, is a meditation on love, authenticity, and the performativity of cultural codes. The group piece Collective Sensations (2009) rubbed the edges between imagination and sensation through movement and language to activate a trans-personal field of experience.
After spending a few years mostly in dance studios, developing dance scores around notions of companionship, alterity and approximation as modes of co-presence while revisiting the various collective structures she had been engaged in, Alice presented those in a lecture performance called Togethering, a Group Solo (2015). In 2017, she invited Louise Trueheart To Meet, which focused on holding together, with tenderness and curiosity, the shifting asymmetries of their relationship.
These performances have been presented in more than 15 countries, including Beursschouwburg Brussels/Belgium; Links Hall Chicago/USA; ImPulsTanz and Tanzquartier Vienna/Austria; MDT and Weld Stocklholm/Sweden; Tanz Im August, Berlin/Germany; MacBa, Barcelona/Spain.
As a dancer / performer / artistic collaborator, Alice worked, among others, with Jennifer Lacey (Projet Bonbonnière 2005 and Les Assistantes 2008), Juan Dominguez (The application 2005, Clean Room 2012-16), Xavier Le Roy (E.X.T.E.N.S.I.O.N.S. 2001, Project 2002), Mårten Spångberg (Sometimes it looks like a stage performance 2001; Avant-garde 2004), and Tino Sehgal (Kiss, 2006).
Alice took part in the development of numerous choreographic projects and platforms for knowledge production and exchange in the performing arts: the artist-run and informal institution PAF, the open-source internet platform for the production and circulation of dance artists’ discourse everybodystoolbox.net, the open collective "praticable" for the sharing of visibility and physical practices as resources for individual choreographic works (with Isabelle Schad, Frédéric de Carlo, Odile Seitz and Frédéric Gies), and the structure for the circulation and contextualisation of dance practices, founded by Ellen Söderhult and Eleanor Bauer, nobody's business.
2010-2012 she co-directed Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, a centre for artistic research in the Paris outskirts, together with Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Grégory Castéra.
Since 2005, Alice has more and more often found herself teaching in artist-run contexts such as Eks-Scena (Zagreb), Mugatxoan (San Sebastian), Movement Research (New York), Toronto Dance Community Love-in, The Whole Shebang (Philadelphia) or Mezzanine (Porto) as well as universities such as DOCH (Stockholm), HZT (Berlin), SNDO (Amsterdam), JLU (Giessen), a.pass (Brussels) or La Manufacture / HETSR (Lausanne). At ImPulsTanz Vienna Alice has taught regularly since 2013, where she also hosted “Teachback” together with Jennifer Lacey, an experimental space of exchange and undoing for dance artists who teach. A film based on this research, directed by filmmaker Marta Popivoda in collaboration with Lacey and Chauchat, is in the process of being edited.
In 2015 Alice graduated from the Amsterdam Master in Choreography, and is now engaging a doctoral research on relational subjectivities in dance. She is currently a guest professor in HZT Berlin (2017-19).
Artist's Statement
Contact: alicechauchat (a) yahoo.fr