News

Kultur | lx – Arts Council Luxembourg, together with its partners the Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, the TROIS C-L – Centre de Création Chorégraphique Luxembourgeois and the Compagnie La Baraka, is offering, for the fifth year, a Choreographic residency at La Chapelle Sainte-Marie in Annonay for the support of artists in the final steps of their creation, codirectedby the choreographers Abou Lagraa & Nawal Lagraa Aït-Benalla of the Compagnie La Baraka.

Following a call for applications, the committee made up of Bernard Baumgarten (TROIS C-L), Tom Leick-Burns (Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg), Davy Brun (Centre National de la Danse in Lyon) and Tania Soubry (choreographer and 2022 laureate), decided to grant the residency to Sarah Baltzinger.

Committee Statement
The committee acknowledged Sarah Baltzinger’s meticulous writing style and aesthetics, conducting in-depth research that questions the norms of our societies. With this project, she will tackle a continuously urgent theme – the relationship with the female body and the projected image of women. The committee sees Sarah Baltzinger as a rising choreographer in Luxembourg and in Europe, gaining in work quality and visibility in recent years, particularly since her presentation at the Talent Lab in 2020. The residency she will be offered in Annonay, followed by a premiere at the Grand Théâtre, will mark a new step in her career evolution.

About Sarah Baltzinger
Sarah Baltzinger is a cross-border choreographer working in Luxembourg and France. Her choreographic work is characterised by a singular research on the exposure of bodies and their dislocation, summoning polymorphous aesthetics with several influences ranging from painting to underground culture. Marked by the development of a strong musical identity, Sarah Baltzinger’s artistic universe is built in close collaboration with the composer Guillaume Jullien.

She uses the body, in relation to different materials, as a complex tool of possibilities to alter the natural approach to movement and create peculiar worlds. In this way she seeks to reveal the emotional journeys that push bodies into disarticulation and deformation. Concerned about the dysfunctional patterns of our intimate and social world, she wishes to create singular and revealing objects, at a meeting point between several disciplines, in order to question the bonds that tie us and the strangeness of performing and representing social identities. By seeking to distort our relationship to the norm, Sarah Baltzinger questions this permanent tension between what places and displaces us, and seeks to reveal what we make, what we hide and what we show of ourselves, in the face of a world of injunctions and power, in order to bear witness to the issues of freedom.

For her next creation, which will come to fruition thanks to this choreographic residency, Sarah Baltzinger wishes to address the question of the re-appropriation of the female body. This new choreographic object will invite us to question our gaze through a staging that deconstructs the female body as a product and object of subjection. Five women on stage will try to take hold of their own bodies to tell our contemporary mythologies about the feminine and its alienation, asking the question of “how” to emancipate ourselves from what exploits us.

The residency holder will thus benefit from a specific assistance offering financial support as well as networking around a choreographic creation project. She will be welcomed for a 4-week creative residency at the Chapelle Sainte-Marie and then for a 2-week technical residency at the Théâtre des Cordeliers in Annonay.

The creation co-produced by the Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg will also be an integral part of the theatre’s 2023/2024 programme and will be previewed there.

The creation co-produced by the Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg will also be an integral part of the theatre’s 2022/2023 programme and will be presented there in premiere.