Nadia Beugré
Born in Ivory Coast, Nadia Beugré made her first appearance in 1995 as a member of the Dante Theatre. Two years later, she became a founding member of Béatrice Kombé’s groundbreaking, all-female dance ensemble, TchéTché, with whom she toured for years to critical acclaim across Africa, Europe and North America. Through Beatrice Kombé, an immensely free woman, Nadia Beugré understands that the stage is a ring where anything can happen… After Kombé’s death, she follows a training at Germaine Acogny’s Ecole des sables in Senegal, and then joined in 2009 ex.e.r.ce., Mathilde Monnier’s programme for talented, up-and-coming choreographers at the Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier. In Nadia Beugré’s journey, there is also another crucial encounter: Alain Buffard with whom she performed Mauvais genre and Baron Samedi. “He pushed me to understand why I was relentlessly questioning the body, the sexuality, the gender. He was a gentle and generous man, an extraordinary listener, but he also shared his dark spaces with us. In the same way, I question this dark side in me, the darkness in the light that makes us so complex beings.” For a decade, Nadia Beugre’s pieces have been developing a very singular journey around margins, exclusion, what is outside, abnormal, a journey through shifting identities, be they social, cultural or gender-based… The body of works include the still-touring solo Quartiers libres (‘Free rein’) composed in 2012, Legacy premiered at the La Bâtie festival in Geneva in 2015, Tapis Rouge (2017) and Roukasskass Club (2019). L’Homme rare, an all-male quintet performance, was premiered at the Montpellier Dance Festival in 2020. Followed in 2023 two pieces portraying the city of Abidjan and a new Ivorian generation in fire…, the Filles-Pétroles duet and Prophétique. Beugré also performs in works by fellow choreographers, such as Seydou Boro, Dorothée Munyaneza, Bernardo Montet, Rémy Héritier, Boris Charmatz and in 2022 Robyn Orlin. Other recent collaborations include the choreographic direction for Atem, a musical production of Staatstheater Darmstadt in 2020, a collaboration that was pursued in 2022 around Mozart’s Don Giovanni with Entre deux. Nadia Beugré is associate artist at the Briqueterie in Vitry-sur-Seine (2021-2023) and to ICI CCN de Montpellier Occitanie (2023-2024). She was awarded in 2023 the SACD Prize New Choreographic Talent. With Virginie Dupray, Nadia Beugré has founded in 2020 her own dance company in Montpellier, Libr’Arts, a platform for production, touring but also training, developing actions and programmes between France and Ivory Coast.
