- 2009
- France
After a disappointing experience at the Cannes Festival, not quite the right audience for his aerial dance routine, Nomad-Philippe Bost made the acquaintance of Jenny Gallego. She had just choreographed a new piece in honour of her grandmother: the woman, the granny, the charismatic matriarch at the centre of her family. To music by Lhasa and Bratsch, she composed five minutes of pure danced emotion. Together, the pair decided to build a show around this scene. In July they travelled to Poland, where Jenny’s grandmother had once lived, before returning to France to test their work in progress. Jerzy Zon, director of KTO Théâtre, invited them to return the following year and perform at the festival he was organising in Poland. As Jean-Georges Tartar(e) might put it: "coincidences are luck’s way of shouting at you.” Thanks to this serendipitous turn of events, Compagnie Étoile de Mer was born – along with its first ever show, "Juste pour rêver.”
Since 2013, Compagnie Étoile de Mer has also taken a close interest in teaching, offering specialist courses combining dance with circus arts, aiming to create an artistic dialogue between dancing, speech, drawing and writing, as well as the technique of harness dancing (a discipline taught by just three companies in France). They also enjoy combining their dancing (in the air and on the ground) with other artistic practices.
