Thomas Lebrun
Never where you would expect him to be, Thomas Lebrun slips like an eel between adjectives and categories. After performing in the plays of Bernard Glandier, Daniel Larrieu, Christine Jouve, and Christine Bastin, he founded his company, Illico, in 2000. He has since developed a multifaceted body of work, tinted with disco in Les Soirées What You Want?, with autobiography in Itinéraire d'un danseur grassouillet (The Journey of a Chubby Dancer), or romantic in La jeune fille et la mort (Death and the Maiden). The fantasy dance can conjure (La Constellation consternée (The Appalled Constellation)), gender (Tel quel ! (As is!), aimed at children), love and sexuality (Trois décennies d'amour cerné (Three Decades of Surrounded Love)), all appear like recurring themes in his work, symbolic of a process that is both formal and very much anchored in the real, as well as preoccupied with the question of the transmission of knowledge. In 2012, he left the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region to become director of the Centre choréographique national in Tours. There, he works with virtuoso dancers, joined by additional performers of all ages and backgrounds. The diversity and loyalty of his collaborators are but hints of Thomas Lebrun's challenging and self-confident vision of the art of choreography.
RB, April 2014
