Nina Santes
(co-founder)

Nina Santes made her debut on stage 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 composer Kasper Toeplitz, Transmorphonema, a duet with choreographer Daniel Linehan (Vif du Sujet SACD 2014), and Self made man (2015).

In March 2016, she co-wrote a duet in collaboration with Célia Gondol: A leaf. The duet is recreated for the Avignon Festival in 2019.

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 creates 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.

From 2022, she opens a new cycle of creations, Beauty Glow Tanning Studio. The first episode of this cycle is a solo entitled Peeling Back.

She is an associate artist at the Atelier de Paris CDCN from 2019 to 2021, then at the Centre Chorégraphique National d’Orléans as well as at the Manège de Reims, with La Fronde, from 2021 to 2024.

Nina Santes’ artistic approach is deeply transdisciplinary. A choreographic language emerges that articulates gesture with multiple practices, such as speech, song, music, and the relationship to matter and objects. His projects are thought of as alternative spaces offranting the possibility of an experience of transformation – of affects, of ideas. A displacement of the gaze and perception. Through immersive devices for the viewer, she explores the relationship between the lʼindividual and his or her environment, between the time of work and the time of contemplation, between the lʼexperience of the real and the outpouring of the fiction.

Nina Santesʼ artistic approach is particularly interested in the notion of potentiality – of a body, of an individual, of a group – and is based on a philosophy of lʼautodidaxis. Learning by doing, de-hierarchizing and circulating knowledge and practices, building other forms of individual and collective power.