Klemark Performing arts & Music Management

Blanca Li is a choreographer, film director, dancer and actress. She moved to Paris at the end of 1992. B y t h e n ex t y e a r , s h e h a d s t a r t e d h e r own co n tempora r y d a n ce company. 28 years later, still at the head of one of the few totally independent companies on the French and international scene, Blanca Li remains as free and inventive as she was when she started out. She was appointed the artistic director of the Teatros del Canal in Madrid in 2019. She recently developed Le Bal de Paris, an immersive live performance enhanced by virtual reality, which won the prize for Best Virtual Reality Experience at the Venice Mostra in September 2021. Her countless high-profile collaborations have included developing choreographies for musical artists, lending her talents as an actress to film directors, bringing her installations, events and dance pieces to major institutions, and designing events for fashion and luxury brands.

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Having settled in France in 1992, Blanca Li founded her company in Paris in 1993, and has thus far created 14 works for her repertory. Starting in 1998, she opened her own dance studios in Paris (Studios Calentito). The fusion of disciplines and genres is frequent in her creations, as is a very Latin sense of humor (Alarme, Stress, Salomé). Macadam Macadam, a choreographed hip hop show, opened the Suresnes Cités Danses festival in 1999. From Avignon to the USA to the Opéra-Comique in Paris, that show became the reference in the genre and obtained the Globe de Cristal for Best Opera or Ballet from the French press in 2007. Her one-woman show Zap ! Zap ! Zap ! (1999) was presented at Chaillot, among other French venues, and then in New York as part of the French Moves festival.
Blanca Li takes on a wide range of themes with her company, ranging from the Gnawa trance ceremonies of Marrakesh (Nana et Lila, 1993) to ancient Greek art (Le Songe du Minotaure, 1998), to the madness of the contemporary world in the context of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks (Borderline, 2002), to the poems of Federico García Lorca (Poeta en Nueva York, 2007) and the pictorial work of Hieronymous Bosch with Le Jardin des Délices (2009), which opened the Montpellier Danse festival.
Corazón Loco (2007) mingled the company’s dancers with opera singers from the Sequenza 9.3 vocal ensemble in a contemporary musical work and was the subject of Blanca Li’s second feature-length film. Elektro Kif (2010) brought to the stage for the first time the électro style, a new urban dance that emerged in the Paris suburbs in the 2000s and that took the world by storm with its ultra-fast and sophisticated gestures. Robot, created for the 2013 Montpellier Danse festival, in collaboration with Japanese artists from the Maywa Denki collective and NAO robots from Aldebaran Robotics, triumphed at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris in December 2013 and throughout France on tour in 2014-2015.