Maguy Marin

Maguy Marin is a French choreographer born in 1951 in Toulouse whose work redefined contemporary dance through theatre, collective physicality, and the embodied expression of human condition. She studied at the Toulouse Conservatory and with Nina Vyroubova in Paris before dancing with the Strasbourg Opera corps de ballet from 1968 to 1972. Her formal training continued at Maurice Béjart's Mudra school in Brussels, where she absorbed the rigorous, politically conscious approach that would shape her own practice. From 1974 to 1977 she performed with Béjart's Ballet du XXe siècle and participated as a choreographer in *Yu-Ku-Ri* (1976).

In 1978, Marin founded Ballet-Théâtre de l'Arche with Daniel Ambash. The company became Compagnie Maguy Marin in 1984 and went on to hold national choreographic-centre residencies in Créteil and Rillieux-la-Pape before settling at RAMDAM near Lyon in 2015 as part of a shared art-centre project. This institutional trajectory embedded her creative practice within civic space and public access, linking choreography to sustained ensemble work and community engagement.

Marin's breakthrough came with *May B* in 1981, created from deep engagement with Samuel Beckett's writing. The work has remained in continuous international circulation with more than 800 documented performances since its premiere. In *May B*, ensembles of heavy, ragged bodies shuffle, jolt, collide, and cluster, repeatedly negotiating standing and falling. This physical awkwardness resists idealized virtuosity and transforms shared space into a social drama of domination, fear, solidarity, sadness, and hope. The work announced a radically different language for what bodies could express together.

Throughout her career, Marin created works of sustained invention: *Cendrillon* (1985), *Coups d'état* (1988), *Made in France* (1992), *Umwelt* (2004), *Turba* (2007), and *Salves* (2010). Her broader practice engages research through body, space, light, time, matter, and sound, with political meaning emerging through embodied presence. In 2016, La Biennale di Venezia awarded her its Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Dance. Her work has been preserved on film through Numeridanse, which maintains full-length recordings and documentary material spanning multiple works across four decades.