Associated Artist – Nina Santes
Nina Santes
— Artist associated with the CCNO
Affirming the place and representation of women in the artistic world
is a daily endeavour for the CCNO. Beneficiary beginning this year of
the “associated artist” initiative, the CCNO has resolved to further
affirm this commitment by entering into a three-year partnership with
choreographer Nina Santes. Public events, performances and creative
residencies initiated by and with Nina Santes will impact, shake up,
pervade, and embody the work of the Centre chorégraphique.
Nina Santes
makes her stage debut as a puppeteer. Since 2008 she has collaborated as a performer with many artists. She is the author of choreographic and musical pieces, including Désastre (2012), in collaboration with the composer Kasper Toeplitz, Transmorphonema, a duet with the choreographer Daniel Linehan, and Self made man (2015). In March 2016, she co-signed a duet in collaboration with Célia Gondol: A leaf. In 2018, she created Hymen Hymne, a choreographic and musical creation for 5 performers. The same year, she received the SACD New Choreographic Talent Prize. In 2020, she created République Zombie, a creation for three performers. She also created (Though a silent orchestra, they were full of) ELEGIES, a sound and choreographic performance for the voice of a child and a group of traditional singers, for the MIR Festival - Athens. In 2021, the Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon invites her to create a solo, LA VENERINA, for the dancer Elsa Monguillot. In 2022, she opens a new cycle of creations, Beauty Glow Tanning Studio. This cycle is made up of three episodes: Peeling Back (solo, creation 2023), Deep Deep Down Detox (installation-performance, 2023/2024), Wet Songs (collective piece 2025/2026).
Créations
Wet Songs – Episode 3 of BEAUTY GLOW TANNING STUDIO cycle by Nina Santes — 2025
“Wet Songs is the 3rd creation of the Beauty Glow Tanning Studio cycle. This cycle of creations is strongly influenced by the theories of feminist science fiction, and is inspired by Fiction-panier by Ursula Le Guin or even Histoires de Camille
by Donna Haraway. Through their works, these authors and theorists
propose to escape from “history that kills”; the one that exhausts our
resources and dries up our imaginations, the one that isolates,
distances, freezes our bodies by sublimating the apocalypse. They view
science fiction as a tool for creating alternative visions for our
world. Their “living stories” speak of metamorphoses, mutation,
symbiosis, alliances, inclusion, anti-capitalism, decolonial practices,
extinction of patriarchy… With Wet Songs, I would like to weave
stories, songs, dances, which come from liquid worlds. The fiction of
the piece will be based on water as an entity, as a medium, as a
transformative and gestational environment. In our imaginations, we will
swallow the Beauty Glow Tanning Studio to the bottom of the
waters, it will become a vestige of itself. What figures, what gestures,
what rituals, what voices emerge from the abyss? If water spoke, what
would it tell us today?”
— Nina Santes
Peeling Back – Episode 1 of the BEAUTY GLOW TANNING STUDIO series by Nina Santes — 2023
As a choreographer, Nina Santes sees the stage as a space of
emancipation, metamorphoses and freedom. Coming from the world of
traveling theater, she began as a puppeteer before turning to dance.
In this new cycle of creation, designed in three stages, the performer invites us into a beauty salon, the Beauty Glow Tanning Studio,
which she envisions as a creature-place. In this place, paradoxes
collide, between the digestion of violence and the quest for a form of
radical beauty.
First episode of this cycle, the solo Peeling Back focuses on
the myths of sacrifice, between satire and ritual. In this show inspired
by feminist science fiction, Nina Santes continues her work on the
language of the dissociated, puppet body.
For each performance, she invites a personality from music, culinary,
literary, cosmetic or activist worlds to share the stage with her. A way
to offer you a unique piece.
République zombie by Nina Santes — 2020
République Zombie is a piece to question, exacerbate a zombie state, in the sense of a “numbing of time, of action, of the whole world” (R. Barthes), and to perform our strategies of awakening, of putting ourselves on alert. It is a choreographic and musical project which takes the figure of the zombie as its starting point and through it is interested in the phenomena of dissociation, disappearance and presence.
Hymen hymne by Nina Santes — 2018
Hymen hymne is a choreographic and musical project for 5 performers, born from my desire to extend the work of embodying marginal, hybrid, other figures and bodies, initiated in particular with the solo Self made man.
Beyond the practice of witchcraft, this project calls on the witch as a future, a potential, a social construction. The one who is qualified or self-proclaimed, the one who is rejected or who deliberately chooses to occupy the margins, the one who is deviant, takes care of the obscure, seizes her body and her voice to cast a spell on the established order.
Inspired by the ecofeminist movements born at the end of the 1970s in the United States and the resurgence of the figure of the witch as a symbol of subversion, Hymen hymne is an immersive form of spoken, danced and sung concert, working at the crossroads of documentary research and the creation of a magico-political ritual.
A Leaf by Nina Santes & Célia Gondol — 2016 — Recreated 2019
A Leaf is a choreographic and musical concert in which the presence and voices of Célia Gondol and Nina Santes invade the space and seek to make the spectator’s body vibrate. A live performance, a rebus made up of danced, sung and spoken pieces.
A Leaf unfolds the fiction of two creatures charged with flow, who explore the space of the theater as a field of forces to be made perceptible, sing their environmental melancholy, dance the fifth dimension and the feeling of love.
A Leaf is a cabaret of physical noises, slows, flashes,
harmonies, resonances, between gravitational waves and dark energies,
troubled states and cataclysmic gestures.
The two figures who inhabit the stage invite the public to an immersive
experience and to enter the image through the sound material.
A Leaf is a statement of radical tenderness for a world that does not yet exist or perhaps no longer exists. It is a duo of cannibal galaxies, a cry, a spiral, an alarm to shake our empathic bodies and our telluric emotions.
A Leaf is about, you and me my love.
More information on lafronde.net
-
Public Opening
saturday 11 june 2022
6pmCCNO
Beauty Glow Tanning Studio by Nina Santes
-
Conversation
saturday 21 may 2022
7:30pmCCNO
Conversation with Nina Santes and Olivier Schefer
-
Performance
friday 20 may 2022
8pmCCNO
République Zombie by Nina Santes
-
Workshop
wednesday 18 may 2022
7-9pmCCNO
Workshop voice and hands in the ground with Nina Santes, associate artist, and Jean-Baptiste Veyret-Logerias, collaborator