Mylène Benoit / Choreographer
At the Royal Academy of Arts in London and later at Le Fresnoy – National Studio for Contemporary Arts, Mylène Benoit came to understand that while art reflects on form, it is also a vehicle for aesthetic, historical, and political legacies. Very quickly, she began to involve the body in plural research combining dance, song, sound matter, luminous vibration, and textual elements. Committed and powerful, her original creations privilege women’s perspectives and seek to bring to light entire dimensions of living knowledge that have long been silenced.
Mylène Benoit advocates for a collaborative and multifaceted company model, embodied both through artistic creations and through the active presence of the team across different territories. Convinced that dance and the arts provide tools for analyzing and interpreting contemporary society, she has been developing since 2024 the choreographic and social innovation project FAIRE MONDE, which proposes new modes of intervention, new relationships with local inhabitants, and new ways of sharing the “procreative powers” of creation.
The company’s repertoire includes around fifteen works, among them Archée, created at the Cloître des Célestins for the Avignon Festival in 2021. Mylène Benoit was associate artist at Le Vivat, a subsidised dance and theatre stage in Armentières, from September 2011 to June 2014. She curated Danses Augmentées at the Gaîté Lyrique in Paris, was associate artist at Le Phare – CCN du Havre Normandie, in long-term residency at L’Échangeur / CDCN Hauts-de-France, a member of the Ensemble Associé at Théâtre des 13 vents CDN Montpellier, and associate artist at Théâtre du Beauvaisis, scène nationale in Beauvais. She was awarded the Villa Kujoyama residency in 2017. Most recently, she was associate artist with the Grand Ensemble des Quinconces & L’Espal, scène nationale of Le Mans, until 2023.
Ethics of Creation, Ethics of Relation: Why Dance?
“As Steve Paxton says, ‘There is no such thing as dancing solo.’ Saying ‘I dance’ is always a kind of grammatical error: in reality, it is not I who dance, but the relationship that is woven between myself and others.” — Emma Bigé, Mouvementements
I dance because I have seen others dance; I dance because others have perceived me. Dance is born of sharing and mimesis; it is an art of relation to the world, a movement common to all eras and all cultures. It was practiced as a social and religious gesture long before it emerged as one of the Fine Arts, and it bears witness to the ritual and performative nature of art: dancing to imitate birds, or the rotation of the stars. Making a dance whose purpose is not to show, represent, or seduce, but to be effective—almost magical. We dance to bring things into being, to bend reality, to revive an intuitive form of knowledge transmitted through bodies and across generations.
A tool for tuning our breath, our trances, and our affects, dance is a trans-individual power. Dance begins when my movements are woven together with those of others, when they lose the mark of what I stubbornly believe to be my property—my action—and become something shared.
Recent studies in neuroscience establish a direct link between dance and the capacity for empathy: dancers and movement practitioners demonstrate greater acuity in perceiving emotions. Dance, and the sensorimotor experiences it offers, increase our propensity for compassion.
Through its attention to the self, to the very small, the infinitesimal, the phylogenetic, the practice of dance is a radical opening to the outside. It has the power to remind us that we share a community of destiny with all the humans who came before us and those who surround us.