Stéphanie Barba

Twice a year, the Bejart Ballet Lausanne invites a Swiss artist to create its own art project in line with the company during the rehearsals in its studios.

“The one that draws dance, touch it”

The French artist Stéphanie Barba sketches just like how she breaths, an actor in the middle of the company. Like them, she encourages spontaneity and instinctively responds to rhythm, exercises the suppleness of gesture, reveals the essence of instantaneity. Like them, she embodies the rhythm of life, its turbulences, its elasticity’s, its dissonances, its harmonies. Stéphanie Barba dances, like them! Self-taught, her entire pencil vibrates with musical inflexions. It dances like those she followed in their movements : Maya Plissetskaya, Maurice Béjart, Roland Petit, Cyril Atanassoff, Gil Roman, Kyra Kharkevitch, Sylvie Guillem…Yet, she has never worn a pair of pointe shoes, never dealt with the rules of the ballet barre, nor flirted airborne. Her passion as illustrator does not come from dance, but by chance, from a door that opened one day. That of the Bolshoi. Since then, the French adventurer has never ceased to stun and has witnessed the link between the arts. “I do not look at what I am doing; I follow the dancer’s intention. He twirls, I twirl. He falls, I fall. He pleas or exhilarates, and my pencil also does this. Everything goes fast; I did not have the time to intellectualise this.” Inspired by the performance hall’s fullness since the 80’s, Stéphanie Barba draws them, meditating in her bubble.

Florence Millioud-Henriques (24 heures)