Flora Détraz
Flora Détraz is a dancer, choreographer, vocalist and director. After studying ballet at the Boulogne-Billancourt Conservatory, as well as literary and philosophical studies in a preparatory class in Paris, she passed the National Choreographic Centre of Rillieux-la-Pape, under the direction of Maguy Marin. She then completed the choreographic research cycle of the Forum Dança, in Lisbon, a city where she lived for 9 years. During this period, she had the opportunity to meet artists such as Meredith Monk, Marlene Monteiro Freitas, Vera Mantero, Meg Stuart or Lia Rodrigues, who inspired her own practice.
Since 2013 and within the company PLI, she has been developing choreographic and vocal projects that explore the links between the visible and the invisible, and that question social conventions through the body.
PEUPLEMENTS (2013), a piece for four female opera singers inspired by a short story by Samuel Beckett, reveals the organisation of a micro-society in a regulated space. The solo GESÄCHT (2014) questions the codes of representation, by declining the figure of a singer. TUTUGURI (2016) features a ventriloquist’s body, prey to its own inner chaos. In MUYTE MAKER (2018), four women, appear like flowering nymphs and captive to a constraining system, sarcastically interpret songs from the repertoire of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The trio GLOTTIS (2021), inspired by surrealist cinema, features sleepwalkers-night birds, seized by delirious visions.
Flora Détraz is currently working on her next creation entitled HURLULA (September 2023), a diptych composed of a film and a performance-concert, around the act of screaming.
As a performer, she has collaborated with Marlene Monteiro Freitas, Laurent Cèbe, Cédric Cherdel, Sara Anjo and Nach.
Tours
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Artist’s website
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Contacts
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Production/Administration
Aline Berthou&Charlotte Bayle
aline@aoza-production.com
charlotte.b@aoza-production.com
+336 58 39 78 18
Distribution
Key Performance
Koen Vanhove & Anna Skonecka
koen@keyperformance.se
anna@keyperformance.se
Credits
Gesächt © Pablo Lopez
Tutuguri ©Pablo Lopez
Muyte Maker © Bruno Simao
Glottis © Paulo Pacheco
HURLULA ©Vincent Bosc & Flora Détraz, 2022
• on tour •
Gesächt • Creation 2014
Gesächt is a solo piece that explores the idea of the body composed of many other bodies: we are all the bodies that we have imitated, admired, loved, hated. The title Gesächt combines the German words “Gesicht”, meaning the “face”, and “Gestalt”, the “figure” or the “shape”. Flora Détraz embodies a figure of an opera singer, who plays with the performance’s codes: a preparation, an entrance on a stage, a greeting an imaginary pianist, lyrical climax, a greeting the audience. Inspired by the German baritone Dietrich Fisher Diskau and his several performances of the lieder of Schubert, the piece is based on a dialogue between the voice and the movement, both responding to and confronting each other in a captivating duel. The vocal body turns into a vibrant space, where different figures appear and disappear.
Duration : 20 minutes or 50 minutes en diptyque avec le solo TUTUGURI
This solo is often presented as a diptych together with a solo TUTUGURI. For both solos, there are two versions, one with the set, and an in-situ version without any set (for museum, open air spaces, empty stage spaces, etc.). The set is composed of a wall made out of hanging wooden painted cleats that move with the movements of air that come and go through the stage. In GESÄCHT, the set alludes to the essential red stage curtain, before being transformed as an ritual object in TUTUGURI
Concept and choreography Flora Détraz
Light design Arthur Gueydan
Set design Camille Lacroix (only for the version that includes the set)
Costume design Flora Détraz
Light desk Arthur Guedan/Eduardo Abdala
Music Der Leierman of Franz Schubert
Greetings – Marlene Monteiro Freitas
Administration and production Aoza Production / Aline Berthou et Charlotte Bayle
Distribution Key Performance / Anna Skonecka et Koenraad Vanhove
Production PLI
Coproductions Materiais Diversos, Pt ; PACT Zollverein, De ; MA scène nationale, Montbéliard, Fr ; Relais culturel de Falaise, Fr ; CCN de Caen en Normandie, direction Alban Richard
Résidences Ramdam, un centre d’art, Fr ; Alktantara, Pt ; Espacio Azala, Es
This project was supported by D.R.A.C Normandie dans le cadre de l’Aide au projet and Gulbenkian Fondation of Portugal.
GESÄCHT was created in the frame of the research program PEPCC, Forum Dança, Lisbonne, Pt
Tutuguri • Creation 2016
TUTUGURI is a tribute to the poet Antonin Artaud and to his text Tutuguri, the dark sun ritual, dedicated to the Peyote ritual of the Tarahumara, a group of indigenous people of the Americas.
Based on the dissociation between the voice and the body, this solo becomes a hallucinatory “sound dance”. A woman-medium becomes a live repository, welcoming in her body many voices, beings, identities and stories. This ventriloquist body springs a wide range of sounds: warblings, whispers, fractions of conversations, animal noises, babies cooing or jingling of the aliens.
Duration : 25 minutes or 50 minutes en diptyque avec le solo Gesächt.
This solo is often presented as a diptych together with a solo piece GESÄCHT. For both solos, there are two versions, one with the set, and an in-situ version without any set (for museum, open air, empty stage spaces, etc).
The set is composed of a wall made of hanging wooden painted cleats that move with the movements of air that come and go through the stage. In GESÄCHT, the set alludes to the essential red stage curtain, before being transformed as a ritual object in TUTUGURI.
Concept and choreography Flora Détraz
Light design Arthur Gueydan
Set design Camille Lacroix (only for the version with set)
Costume design Flora Détraz
Light desk Arthur Guedan/Eduardo Abdala
Creation assistants Anaïs Dumaine, Konrad Kaniuk, Paula Caspão
Administration and production Aoza Production / Charlotte Bayle et Aline Berthou
Diffusion Key Performance / Anna Skonecka et Koenraad Vanhove
Production PLI
Co-productions Materiais Diversos (PT) / PACT-Zollverein (DE)/ MA scène nationale, Montbéliard (FR) / Relais culturel de Falaise (FR)/ CCN de Caen en Normandie, direction Alban Richard.
Residencies Ramdam, un centre d’art (FR) / Alktantara (PT) / Espacio Azala (ES).
This creation was supported by the D.R.A.C Normandie in the frame of the Aide au projet and from the Gulbenkian foundation in Portugal.
Muyte Maker • Creation 2018
Through an exploration of medieval images, trivial ditties and grotesque paintings, Muyte Maker celebrates disobedient and irrational bodies. It examines joy as a physical and existential statement: joy as desire and creative potential, going against the grain of morality, and as a physical distortion or contradiction. The four women performers sing copiously, laugh polyphonically, dance blindly, and chat cacophonously, in an attempt to render the full complexity of their own bodies.
Artistic direction Flora Détraz
Performers Mathilde Bonicel, Inês Campos / Joana Schweizer (alternating), Flora Détraz and Agnès Potié
Set and costume design Camille Lacroix
Light design Arthur Gueydan
Sound design Guillaume Vesin
Light desk Arthur Geydan / Eduardo Abdala (alternating)
Sound desk Colombine Jacquemont
Physical preparation during the creation and external eye Anaïs Dumaine
Administration and production Aoza Production / Charlotte Bayle et Aline Berthou
Distribution Key Performance / Anna Skonecka et Koenraad Vanhove
Production PLI
Co-productions CCN de Caen en Normandie, direction Alban Richard (Fr), Ramdam-un centre d’art (Fr), Relais culturel des Pays de Falaise (Fr), Pact-Zollverein (De), La place de la danse CDCN (Fr), Le réseau des Petites Scènes Ouvertes (Fr), Alkantara (Pt), in the frame of DNA-departures and arrivals European network.
Studios and residencies supports Espaço Alkantara (Pt), O espaço do tempo (Pt), Les Eclat(s) chorégraphiques (Fr), l’Avant-Scène (Fr)
The project received the financial support of Région Normandie and DRAC Normandie.
Glottis • Creation 2021
GLOTTIS takes place in a cave, in the darkest depths of a cave, in ancestral times, in future times, or even outside of time.
Three big-eyed individuals – somnambulists, blind visionaries, shamans under hypnosis –dedicate themselves to mysterious practices. They communicate with each other in a guttural and rhythmic language that resembles a sound of beatboxing and seem to have a talk with invisible forces. This trio, with the unsetting appearances of a fantastic prophecy, is an oneiric experience through the twists and turns of magic and unconscious. Inspired by the expressionist and surrealist cinema from the beginning of XX st Century, GLOTTIS advocates the occult.
Duration 55 minutes
Concept and choreography Flora Détraz
Performance Mathilde Bonicel, Flora Détraz et Yaw Tembe
Light design Eduardo Abdala
Sound design Guillaume Vesin
Set design Camille Lacroix
Costume design Clara Ognibene et Marisa Escaleira
Creation assistant Agnès Potié
Light desk Eduardo Abdala / Tatiana Carret
Sound desk Colombine Jacquemont
Administration and production Aoza Production / Charlotte Bayle et Aline Berthou
Distribution Key Performance / Anna Skonecka et Koenraad Vanhove
Production PLI
Co-productions Alkantara/Lisbon – Pt, Le Gymnase CDCN/Roubaix – Fr, Scène nationale 61 / Alençon – Fr, Le Phare CCN – direction Emmanuelle Vo-Dinh / Le Havre – Fr, Pact-Zollverein / Essen – De, December Dance (Culturcentrum & Concertgebouw Brugge) / Brugge – Be, Théâtre de Choisy-Le-Roi, La Briqueterie – CDCN, Theater Freiburg / Freiburg – De, Espaces Pluriels / Pau – Fr, A Oficina / Guimaraes – Pt.
Residencies O Espaço do Tempo/Montemor-o-novo – Pt, Teatro Municipal do Porto/ Porto – Pt
• on creation •
HURLULA • Creation 2023
Between dance, music and film, HURLULA is a project on screaming, composed of two parts: a performance in the form of a choreographed trio concert and a movie about an oracle-woman under prophetic hallucinations.
Combining the French verb « hurler », paroxysmal expression of the scream and « hululer » referring more specifically to the screams of animals at night, HURLULA offers an emotional peregrination in depths of a human body. The piece will be intimist, ecstatic and lunar. It will be a liberating impulse from the shackles of beauty and feminine decorum.
