Affirming the place and representation of women in the artistic world is a daily endeavour for the CCNO. Beneficiary beginning this year of the “associated artist” initiative, the CCNO has resolved to further affirm this commitment by entering into a three-year partnership with choreographer Nina Santes. Public events, performances and creative residencies initiated by and with Nina Santes will impact, shake up, pervade, and embody the work of the Centre chorégraphique.

“Wet Songs is the 3rd creation of the Beauty Glow Tanning Studio cycle. This cycle of creations is strongly influenced by the theories of feminist science fiction, and is inspired by Fiction-panier by Ursula Le Guin or even Histoires de Camille by Donna Haraway. Through their works, these authors and theorists propose to escape from “history that kills”; the one that exhausts our resources and dries up our imaginations, the one that isolates, distances, freezes our bodies by sublimating the apocalypse. They view science fiction as a tool for creating alternative visions for our world. Their “living stories” speak of metamorphoses, mutation, symbiosis, alliances, inclusion, anti-capitalism, decolonial practices, extinction of patriarchy… With Wet Songs, I would like to weave stories, songs, dances, which come from liquid worlds. The fiction of the piece will be based on water as an entity, as a medium, as a transformative and gestational environment. In our imaginations, we will swallow the Beauty Glow Tanning Studio to the bottom of the waters, it will become a vestige of itself. What figures, what gestures, what rituals, what voices emerge from the abyss? If water spoke, what would it tell us today?”
— Nina Santes

As a choreographer, Nina Santes sees the stage as a space of emancipation, metamorphoses and freedom. Coming from the world of traveling theater, she began as a puppeteer before turning to dance.
In this new cycle of creation, designed in three stages, the performer invites us into a beauty salon, the Beauty Glow Tanning Studio, which she envisions as a creature-place. In this place, paradoxes collide, between the digestion of violence and the quest for a form of radical beauty.

First episode of this cycle, the solo Peeling Back focuses on the myths of sacrifice, between satire and ritual. In this show inspired by feminist science fiction, Nina Santes continues her work on the language of the dissociated, puppet body.
For each performance, she invites a personality from music, culinary, literary, cosmetic or activist worlds to share the stage with her. A way to offer you a unique piece.

République Zombie is a piece to question, exacerbate a zombie state, in the sense of a “numbing of time, of action, of the whole world” (R. Barthes), and to perform our strategies of awakening, of putting ourselves on alert. It is a choreographic and musical project which takes the figure of the zombie as its starting point and through it is interested in the phenomena of dissociation, disappearance and presence.

Hymen hymne is a choreographic and musical project for 5 performers, born from my desire to extend the work of embodying marginal, hybrid, other figures and bodies, initiated in particular with the solo Self made man.

Beyond the practice of witchcraft, this project calls on the witch as a future, a potential, a social construction. The one who is qualified or self-proclaimed, the one who is rejected or who deliberately chooses to occupy the margins, the one who is deviant, takes care of the obscure, seizes her body and her voice to cast a spell on the established order.

Inspired by the ecofeminist movements born at the end of the 1970s in the United States and the resurgence of the figure of the witch as a symbol of subversion, Hymen hymne is an immersive form of spoken, danced and sung concert, working at the crossroads of documentary research and the creation of a magico-political ritual.

A Leaf is a choreographic and musical concert in which the presence and voices of Célia Gondol and Nina Santes invade the space and seek to make the spectator’s body vibrate. A live performance, a rebus made up of danced, sung and spoken pieces.

A Leaf unfolds the fiction of two creatures charged with flow, who explore the space of the theater as a field of forces to be made perceptible, sing their environmental melancholy, dance the fifth dimension and the feeling of love.

A Leaf is a cabaret of physical noises, slows, flashes, harmonies, resonances, between gravitational waves and dark energies, troubled states and cataclysmic gestures.
The two figures who inhabit the stage invite the public to an immersive experience and to enter the image through the sound material.

A Leaf is a statement of radical tenderness for a world that does not yet exist or perhaps no longer exists. It is a duo of cannibal galaxies, a cry, a spiral, an alarm to shake our empathic bodies and our telluric emotions.

A Leaf is about, you and me my love.