Matière Mobile

Marie Gourdain is a French choreographer, scenographer and visual artist whose artistic activities have mainly been developed in Prague since 2010, though she also works on various projects more widely in Europe. Her work merges her formation in the visual arts with contemporary dance, drawing on the elements of graphic and sculptural composition (lines and shapes, form, proportion, space, scale, repetition and rhythm) and the detailed analysis of movement. The result is a complex choreographic work that represents a meeting point between a very visual, shaped and focused approach to the body, a blend of different forms of expression and corporal presence, and comprehensive research into the manipulation of stage props and the use of constructions on stage, while also leaving broad scope for intuition, improvisation and humor.

In 2015 she joined the French-Czech physical theatre and dance collective tYhle and began her choreographic work. Today Marie has five pieces in the collective’s repertoire: UN (2016), LEGOrytmus (2017), Medúza (2018), Mu-‐Tation (2021) and Icarus (2021).

Her work is supported by Studio ALTA, a platform for contemporary dance in Prague from which the tYhle collective was the Ambassador (associated artists) in 2020–2021, and by the Tanec Praha organization.

In 2020 Marie received the first International Caroline Neuber Scholarship awarded by the City of Leipzig. In 2020 Marie also attended a training course for choreographers called Édition Spéciale #4 at the National Centre for Dance (CND) in Paris. Following which in the beginning of 2021 she created a new company in France called Matière Mobile. She chose the city of Lyon in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region where she already collaborates with many cultural institutions such as the CND of Lyon, the SUBS, the CCNR of Rillieux-la-Pape, the Maison de la Danse.