Esther Gouarné

I am both a performer and an academic. I did a phD about contemporary collectives and creative processes in the Dutch-speaking theater. I first went to Belgium to nuance and contextualize the notion of "Flemish Wave" used since the 1980s. And to see what was happening on Belgian stages twenty years later. That drove me to go to the Netherlands, to understand the influences shared by those two countries. I had also been acting in student's plays, studied contemporary dance and physical theater (Jacques Lecoq Paris). I did a few internships in collectives like the Warme Winkel, Abattoir Fermé and Wunderbaum.

After a workshop at the RITCS, in Brussels, I participated in the creation of a new sort of collective: a horizontal "alliance". K.A.K.-Koekelberg's Alliance of Craftsmen was born in 2014. We specialized in multidisciplinary and site-specific events, questioning the relation between arts and citizenship, the theater and the city, fiction and reality. We have been working in different urban and industrial contexts (Periferia Renault, Vilvoorde, 2015; Agence de Voyage/Office de Tourisme, Molenbeek, 2015; K.A.K.TV, Molenbeek, 2017; Life, Death & Television, Woluwe St Pierre, 2018). We now meet our new audience, with our first children's play SNOW.

I love teaching too, and I am now coaching young artists within yet another collective: Transfo Collect, dedicated to an alternative mode of artistic education. I am interested in the link between theater-making, pedagogy and social interactions. Crossing cultural and virtual borders through performance. In Rouen I created my company, Cie Lagrimas, made plays combining actions in schools and retirement houses and developped a technique of "chorésigne" with a deaf dancer, Thumette Léon. We are mixing dance and Sign Language to create an encounter between the deaf and hearing cultures through movement ("Haïkus Signés et Dansés").