BIOGRAPHY

Olga de Soto is a Spanish choreographer, dancer and dance researcher based in Brussels. She graduated from CNDC / Centre National de Danse Contemporaine d'Angers after studying classical ballet, contemporary dance, and music theory in her native country.

Olga began her choreographic work focused on research and composition in 1992, exploring different formats in numerous pieces, some conceived in dialogue with works by contemporary music composers, collaborating with IRCAM / Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music in Paris for several years.

Since the early 2000s, she has been dedicated to creative projects often intimately bound to lengthy processes of research, founded on an essential documentation work, where she operates in atypical and alternative temporalities frequently detached from classical production rationales; these temporalities challenge normative conceptions of time and space.

Her work focuses on the themes of memory, trace, and transmission, mixing the language of choreography with those of documentary, performance, visual arts, and installation, playing with the porousness of these different disciplinary fields. It deploys along two research and creation lines.

The first line centres on studying the dancer's corporeal memory through a pluralistic approach to dance and the body. It explores the relationship between gesture's memory, matter and sound in works such as Éclats mats (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2001), the series of accompanied solos INCORPORER ce qui reste ici au dans mon cœur (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2004-2009 & re-activation Mercat de les Flors, Barcelone, 2023), Mirage (Charleroi danse, Brussels, 2019 / Nominated for the Maeterlinck Critic's Prize in the category "Best Dance Performance", in 2019), Paper Mirage (Festival (((Interférence_s))), Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, Paris) or Espejismo desplazado (Joan Miró’s Foundation, Barcelona, 2023).

The second line explores works from the History of Dance within a framework guided by the study of the perceptual memory of spectators and dancers, focusing on voices traditionally marginalised within artistic discourse, while also questioning the impact of live art, its usefulness, and its lasting quality. The resulting projects deal with archives, documentation, testimony, oral sources, narrative, and storytelling, embracing fluidity and non-conformity while playing with the porousness of different disciplines in works such as histoire(s) (Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels, 2004), An Introduction (Tanz Im August, Berlin, 2010), Débords (Festival d'Automne, Paris, (Elle) retient (Biennale de Charleroi danse, Brussels, 2015) or the exhibition Reconstruction of a danse macabre, conceived at the invitation of Museo Nacional Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2024). These different works focus on the spectator's experience and the anthropology of the spectacle while developing through an approach that studies artistic experience based on the oral history of the works.

Olga de Soto’s work has been presented in about twenty countries, in numerous venues and festivals, such as Centre Pompidou, Festival d’Automne, Théâtre de la Bastille, in Paris; Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Halles de Schaerbeek, Charleroi danse, Théâtre Les Tanneurs, in Brussels; Rotterdamse Schouwburg, Rotterdam; Springdance, Utrecht; Hebbel Theater, Tanz Im August, Berlin; Tanzwerkstatt, Münich; Mercat de les Flors, Barcelone; Teatros del Canal, Madrid; Culturgest, Lisbon, Museo Nacional Reina Sofía, in Madrid…).

She is regularly invited to give workshops, lectures, and conferences in academic contexts where she shares and transmits her research methodologies in universities in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. In 2013, de Soto was awarded the Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers - SACD Prize (Belgium) in the category of Performing Arts for her research and creative work on Kurt Jooss' The Green Table. Since 2019, she is a guest lecturer at the Master in Dance of the Antwerp Conservatory / Artesis Plantijn Hogeschool Antwerpen.

PAST AND PRESENT COLLABORATIONS

Dancers
Cyril Accorsi, Albane Aubry, Florence Augendre, Fabian Barba, Alessandro Bernardeschi, Filipa Cardoso, Edith Christoph, Jeanne Colin, Maria de Dueñas Lopez, Talia De Vries, Stefan Dreher, Vincent Druguet, Max Fossati, Pascale Gigon, Hanna Hedman, David Hernandez, Stéphane Hisler, Jaime Llopis, Roser Malagarriga Roselló, Mauro Paccagnella, Meri Pajunpää, Sylvain Prunenec, Alban Richard, Enora Rivière, Françoise Rognerud, Agathe Thévénot

Composers
Thierry De Mey, Stéphan Dunkelman, Michael Jarrell, Denis Pousseur, Fausto Romitelli, Frederic Rzewski, Kaija Saariaho, Salvatore Sciarrino, Stefano Scodanibbio, Aliocha Van der Avoort

Musicians
Gérard Buquet, Mario Caroli, Michaël Frohnmeyer, Garth Knox, Yutaka Oya, Jean-Pierre Peuvion, George Alexander Van Dam, Takashi Yamame, Sachiko Yoshida

Assistants
Florence Augendre, Edith Christoph, Carlos Pez, Françoise Rognerud

Set designers & constructors
Louis Broothaers, Marion Gizard, Shizuka Hariu / SHSH, Daniel Huard, Anne Mortiaux, Yann Stroobant, Thibault Vancraenenbroeck, Patrick Vandewyer, Sophie Whettnall

Costume designers
Dorothée Catry, Line De Munnynck, Micha Deridder, Nathalie Douxfils, Isabelle Lhoas, Thibault Vancraenenbroeck

Lighting
Geni Diez, Henri-Emmanuel Doublier, Gilles Gentner, Philippe Gladieux, Laurence Halloy, Gaspar Schelck, Sarah Scouarnec, Gaëtan van den Berg, Julien Vernay, Thomas Walgrave

Sound, video and stage
Julien Courroye, Eric Desjeux, Didier Demorcy, Mathieu Farnarier, Christophe Gualde, Pierre Gufflet, Daniel Huard, Stanislas Kopec, Julien Lamaze, Clément Marie, Bram Moriau, Benoît Pelé, Régis Planque, Gaëtan van den Berg, Eric Vanden Dunghen, Aliocha Van der Avoort

Video editing
Julien Contreau, Montxo de Soto, Stanislav Dobák, Octavio Iturbe, Aliocha Van der Avoort

Photography
Catherine Alvès, Maite Arberas Arza, Gautier Deblonde, Montxo de Soto, Olga de Soto, Stanislav Dobák, Pierre Grosbois, Laurent Lafolie, Jorge León, Dolorès Marat, Dylan Perrenoud, Chester Pinto, Grégoire Romefort, Mila Ros, Thibault Vancraenenbroeck

Administration, Production & Distribution
Julia Alix, Anne Bautz, Matilde Cegarra, Mirabelle da Palma, Jill Demuelenaere, Edith Depaule, Florence Francisco (Les Productions de la Seine), Teresa Gentile, Anne-Mathilde Guérin, Lisa Gunstone, Quentin Legrand, Tiphaine Marcq, Christophe Slagmuylder, Lut Vandekeybus, Claude Véron, Ecaterina Vidick (Caravan Production)