Isabelle Chassé

Isabelle Chassé is a Canadian circus artist, director and co-founder of The 7 Fingers, the influential Quebec-based collective that redefined contemporary circus as intimate, theatre-centered practice. Born in 1976, Chassé trained at Montréal's National Circus School and toured internationally in her early career with a four-person contortion ensemble, which performed hundreds of shows and won gold-medal recognition at the Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain in Paris and the International Circus Festival of Monte-Carlo.

Chassé became widely recognized for her aerial-contortion-in-silk solo in Cirque du Soleil's *Quidam*, a role she performed from the late 1990s onward. Suspended in a column of red fabric, the act combined wraps, releases, balances and contortion shapes into a single theatrical moment. The recorded 1999 production of *Quidam* preserved her solo and became an influential reference point for later aerial practitioners. Her documented significance lies as an exceptionally visible early interpreter whose performance helped shape how audiences understood the apparatus.

In 2002, Chassé co-founded The 7 Fingers alongside Shana Carroll, Patrick Léonard, Faon Shane, Gypsy Snider, Sébastien Soldevila and Samuel Tétreault. The collective deliberately scaled down from arena spectacle, bringing circus technique closer to theatre, dance, autobiography and ordinary human behavior. She performed in and co-directed *Loft* (2002) and *La Vie* (2007), establishing herself as both interpreter and creative voice within ensemble work.

Her directing practice expanded across multiple forms and scales. Production credits include co-direction of *Nocturnes*, *Vice & Vertu* (2017), *Temporel* (2018) and the film *Out of Order* (2020), alongside assistant-direction roles on works including *Reversible*, *Psy* and *Passengers*. In 2015, she co-directed the acrobatic performances for Dominic Champagne's *Moby Dick* at Montréal's Théâtre du Nouveau Monde.

Chassé has pursued work connecting performance and emerging technology. The 7 Fingers credits her with *Cubes au Carré* (2018), *Soul of the Ocean* with Moment Factory (2019) for Ocean Park Hong Kong, *Éclats* (2023–2024), and the pandemic-era *Summer Tale* (2021). These projects demonstrate an artist moving from the execution of a signature apparatus act toward the design of environments in which bodies, objects, images, sound and digital systems interact.

As an artistic director of The 7 Fingers, Chassé participates in long-term institutional work including juries and the realization of the company's creation and production center. Her career therefore links three phases of Quebec contemporary circus: specialized training in the national school system, global touring as a soloist through Cirque du Soleil, and artist-led collective production at an intimate scale.