Emmanuelle Vo-Dinh

Emmanuelle Vo-Dinh is a choreographer of phenomena, be they social, physiological, psychological, or mechanical: she picks precise facts, observes them, understands them, then transforms them into choreographic and plastic material. After the creation of her company Sui generis in 1997, she first started looking into emotions. She spent two months with neurologist Antonio Damasio in Iowa City to work onTexture/Composite (1999). She then read Jean Oury on schizophrenia, which inspired the play Sagen (2001). This was followed by a more minimalist cycle, based on the themes of repetition, time, and memory, a product of research, work, and life experiences: Croisées (Crossroads, 2004), White light (2005), and Ici/Per.For (2006). The masculine/feminine dichotomy, as well as a more formal research on the relationships between bodies, music, and voice, have been the central axes of her work since 2007 (Ad Astra, Eaux-fortes, -insight-). Since 2012, she has been the director of the Phare, Centre chorégraphique national du Havre Haute-Normandie, and her interest for science has progressively joined her research on fiction and narration to give her plays an additional dramatic dimension.

Portrait of Emmanuelle Vo-Dinh © portrait Olivier Bonnet, photo Christophe Raynaud de Lage