Myriam Gourfink

Myriam Gourfink is a French contemporary dancer, choreographer, researcher and teacher born in 1968. Her practice rests on three converging investigations: sustained study of yoga-derived breathing, mastery of kinetography (the Laban-based movement notation system), and the creation of compositional structures that give performers genuine choice within precise written information.

In 1996, Gourfink began formal research into kinetography and created the solo *Beith*, treating the score not as a finished blueprint but as a field of structured possibilities. Rather than using notation only to preserve choreography, she uses it to communicate spatial and bodily information while leaving room for performer decision-making. Around 1999, she began collaborating with notator Laurence Marthouret, programmer Frédéric Voisin and composer Kasper T. Toeplitz on LOL, a software environment for choreographic composition based on Laban-oriented information. This collaborative project became central to her work.

Gourfink's signature works—*Rare* (2002), *Corbeau* (2007), and *Les Temps tiraillés*—developed a distinctive slow temporality. In these pieces, breath does not decorate movement; it changes the distribution of support and produces micro-adjustments that gradually reorganize the entire body. The spectator's attention shifts from large steps to continuous internal transitions. Her institutional research included artist residencies at IRCAM (2004–05) and Le Fresnoy (2005–06). From 2008 to 2013, she directed the Program for Choreographic Research and Composition at the Royaumont Foundation, creating a context where composition, notation, technology and embodied practice could be studied together.

Later works including *Masse* (2022), created with composer Kasper T. Toeplitz, and *Structure Souffle*, for eight dancers, continue this long investigation into how respiratory elasticity can organize contact, support and collective change. Her teaching similarly treats breathing as an exact compositional resource. Through decades of work, Gourfink has developed a model in which the dancer's attention to breath becomes visible as precise, continuous reorganization of the body.