Grégoire Schaller & Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdoust

Grégoire Schaller (b. 1993) is a visual artist, director and researcher. Alongside his design studies at École Normale Supérieure-Cachan and École Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle – Les Ateliers, he worked with visual artists Théo Mercier, Matthew Barney and Katie Stout. Since 2016 he has created cross-disciplinary performance projects which merge dance, performance and the visual arts, linking performers’ bodies to archetypes such as gymnasts, matadors and satyrs. Schaller interrogates concepts of the spectacular and the virtuoso, our relationship with death and loss, the normative body and the construction of dominant narratives.

Choreographer, performer and visual artist Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdoust (b. 1994) lives and works in Marseilles and Brussels. Having studied fashion design at École Duperré in Paris, he went on to study dance at Institut des Arts Chorégraphiques (ISAC), part of Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. His research focuses on the body in movement, whereby choreography derives from the costume itself. His work addresses a costume’s intrinsic ability to suggest to performers a way of moving, reshaping and reinventing themselves. His primary medium as a visual artist is textiles, which he uses in his patchworks, paintings, costumes and set designs.

grieving is a cross-disciplinary research and creation project on the theatricalisation of death in Japanese culture, comprising field surveys, performative experimentation and costume creation. The research will be in two stages, beginning with an immersion period and meetings with cultural institutions and actors in Japan, followed by a performance in France based on the outcomes of this research. The project will focus on the connection between the representation of death and performativity (butoh dance and the seppuku ritual); costumes and masks as reincarnations of the deceased (noh theatre), and rituals in which the dead are summoned through festivals (by documenting two traditional festivals in Kyoto).

-1 @Romain Muller
-2 Flags Parade DDD @Simon Verjus
-3 Crash – Voyez-Vous @Viciane Lebrun