Creative Crossroad Residency
13 – 23 May 2025
The choreographer Maud Blandel will be the artist in residence during the 18th edition of the “Antistatic” festival. Her artistic research is being carried out within the framework of the “Creative Crossroads” program of the “Life Long Burning” (LLB 3) project.
Initially trained as a dancer, Maud Blandel is a choreographer living in Lausanne (Switzerland). She completed her training with a Master’s degree in Theatre Direction from La Manufacture (Lausanne), and continued her education with The Work.Master programme in performance at la HEAD in Geneva. In 2015, she founded the association I L K A and began her own projects. Her approach to dramaturgy, her taste for transformation and her concern for musicality lead her to create unusualand powerful choreographic objects.
Her creations include Touch down (2015), Lignes de conduite (2018), Diverti Menti (2020), Double Septet (2021) and L’œil nu (2023), awarded with the Swiss Award for choreographic production in 2023.
In her recent works, Maud is interested in exploring physicalities and states of presence resulting from a constant negotiation between principles dictated by/for the collective and individual expressivity. Recently involved in the sound creation of L’oeil nu, she now gives sound and music a decisive place as a genuine dramaturgical tool in her creations.
Alongside her work, Maud has collaborated with artists such as Cindy Van Acker, Heiner Goebbels and Romeo Castellucci, and is currently very active as a dramaturg with young performing artists.
Maud has been artist-in-residence at the Arsenic (Lausanne) since 2018, and will be associate artist at the CNDC in Angers (2024 – 2026) and at Bonlieu scène nationale in Annecy (2024 – 2027). Since 2016, her work has been supported by Parallèle based in Marseille.
RESEARCH PRESENTATION
In her epistolary fiction, Three Guineas, published in 1938, Virginia Woolf gives form to the response of an ‘educated woman’ to the question her interlocutor, an ‘educated man’, addresses her: “According to you, what can be done to avoid war?”
Using this book as a starting point for an upcoming work, Maud Blandel opens a wide-ranging research aiming to transpose the links between war and patriarchy onto the stage in the form of a grotesque choreographic satire.
As part of the Creative Crossroads Programme of The Life Long Burning project, the residency at Brain Store Project during the Antistatic Festival in Sofia will be the very first step of the research process. It will focus mainly on the relationship between sound and movement, following the idea that “there is no such thing as military music, only military relationships to music”.
The performativity sought will be above all anarchic: any attempt to march in step or obey the beat will be deliberately sabotaged.
The artistic residency takes place within the framework of the Creative Crossroads program of the European project “Life Long Burning – Futures Lost and Found” (LLB3), co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union and the National Culture Fund, programme “Creative Europe”.