Emilie Pitoiset

Emilie Pitoiset (b. 1980) is an artist and choreographer, who lives and works in Paris.

Her work examines the resistance of bodies through dance, rituals, sexuality and money. She deploys a visual grammar which borrows freely from film noir, the nouveau roman, secret societies and the ideals and fantasies of popular culture starting in the 1920s.

She has participated in a large number of exhibitions in such institutions as the CND – Centre National de la Danse, Witte de With, Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Shirn Museum, Museo Marino Marini, and Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong-Kong.

Since 2009, Pitoiset has been studying dance marathons. This iconography nourishes the repertory of gestures and postures which is at the heart of her stage and artistic work. On the borders of rupture or falling, these bodies intimately enduring the mechanisms of capitalism seem increasingly contemporary.

Emilie Pitoiset started to get interested in dance marathons in 2009.

During the Great Depression in the USA, some dance contests awarded money to couples for dancing until exhaustion —a quite tempting opportunity for peοple who had just lost everything during the crash of 1929. This ongoing phenomenon, as a legacy of capitalism, led Pitoiset to analyze the movement of human bodies and how it manifests during political, economic and social crisis. Her research focuses on epidemic dances phenomenon and the emergency to produce new forms of resistances during crises —how society has a direct effect on behaviors, how clubs and music impact on peοple, when bodies meet and also shapeshift. Pitoiset finds Αthens an ideal context for her research, seeing a link between the Greek crisis of 2008 and the tragedy of the Great Depression in 1929, as well as looking for the crisis’ defiance.