Trained at the Stedelijk Instituut voor Ballet in Antwerp, Cindy Van Acker began her career as a classical dancer with the Royal Ballet of Flanders and then as a neo-classical dancer with the Grand Théâtre de Genève. She then went underground for eight years, in search of an authentic motivation for movement and dance. She took the opportunity to create a number of experimental shows from 1996 onwards, before founding Cie Greffe in Geneva with Corps 00:00 (2002), a solo that immediately won her international acclaim. After two other solos, Fractie (2003) and Balk 00:49 (2003), she created her first group piece, Pneuma in 2005. This journey from solo to group composition is a constant in Van Acker’s career: her research often takes the time to explore radical approaches to a single body before expanding to several, e.g. the six solos for six dancers Obvie, Lanx, Obtus, Nixe, Nodal, and Antre (2008-2009) led to a piece for six dancers and then to Diffraction in 2011, while the eleven Shadowpieces for eleven performers (2018-2021) led to Without References in 2021.
As early as Kernel (2007), which distributed the realisation of a movement to a chorus of three dancers, Van Acker began to explore the way in which an ensemble of dancers could be considered as a single organism. Depending on the piece, her compositions focus on mechanical iteration, animal movement, or the propagation of immaterial waves, while at the same time looking for the manifestation of humanity in individual discrepancies, or even in the surfacing of emotional responses. This tropism can be seen in Magnitude (2013), created for 22 dancers from Ballet Junior, Anechoic (2014), an outdoor piece for 53 performers, and in parts of Elementen (2016-2017), composed for the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève and the Ballet de Lorraine.
Since 2002, the artist has entered millimetre by millimetre into certain impossible, dis-coordinated organicities, re-informing certain anatomical expectations: she has descended into a form of slowness that almost seems fast; she has cracked space-time through timelessness; she has produced flight whilst anchored to the ground; she has made sound visible and movements vibrate. Her work insists on treating body, sound, space, and light as concerted materials, to be fused together, and on shaking, blurring, and overturning body narratives and conventional perceptual systems, resulting in a series of mutations that take the dance in turn into mechanical, plant, mineral, animal, or cosmic realms.
Whether she focuses on the meanings of the word obvie according to Barthes for a solo, the transport of electrical charges in Ion (2015), Russian futurism for Zaoum (2016), or the paintings of Michaël Borremans for Speechless Voices (2018), the choreographer produces pieces that transcend the boundaries between dance, performance, and the visual arts.
Cie Greffe fully identifies with what contemporary art activity can be today, touching on multiple media, forms, and formats: the exhibition Score Conductor (2012), designed with Victor Roy, presented Van Acker’s dance scores in a visual way; the publication Partituurstructuur (2012), edited by Michèle Pralong, brings together cipher language, dance, and poetry; the boxed set 6/6 (2014) featuring films by Orsola Valenti takes dance outdoors. All these projects bear witness to the cross-disciplinary nature of the choreographer’s creative process.
In 2005, Romeo Castellucci selected Van Acker to represent Switzerland at the Venice Biennale with Corps 00:00. This meeting led to a first artistic collaboration for Dante’s Inferno and Purgatory in Avignon (2008). The collaboration continued with several operas: Wagner’s Parsifal (2011) at La Monnaie, Berg’s Moses und Aron (2015) at Opéra Bastille, Wagner’s Tannhäuser (2017) at the Bayerisches Staatsoper in Munich, Mozart’s The Magic Flute (2018) at La Monnaie, Strauss’s Salome (2018), Don Giovanni (2021), and De temporum fine comoedia (2022) in Salzburg. Most recently, they have collaborated on a new production of Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle at La Monnaie in Brussels, beginning with the Prologue Das Rheingold (2023), followed by The Valkyries (2024).
Van Acker has in turn invited Castellucci to collaborate on her group piece Without References (2021). A radical show, the piece required almost a year’s work and relies on a dramaturgy that questions the plurality of forms and durations that trace and make traces.
In November 2023, the choreographer was invited to open the DepARTures Festival in Munich. She came up with Sunfish, a tribute evening to Mika Vainio, a pioneer of electronic music, long-time collaborator, and friend who died in 2017. Sunfish is a creation that blends together pieces and extracts from existing pieces created with his music.
Van Acker has also been working with Victor Roy and dancers Daniela Zaghini and Stéphanie Bayle on her new creation, Quiet Light, a piece that seeks to let itself be written by evanescent notions, suitable for composing the trajectories or enigmas of bodies, light, and sound. The work premiered on 13 June 2024 at LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura on the opening night of the Lugano Dance Festival.
More broadly, Compagnie Greffe is currently looking for new creative arrangements that pay as much attention to connection, slowness and transmission as to question of ecological transition.
