Olga de Soto
Olga de Soto is a choreographer, dancer and dance researcher. She was born in Valencia (Spain) and currently lives in Brussels (Belgium). She graduated from CNDC / Centre National de Danse Contemporaine d’Angers, after having studied classical ballet, contemporary dance, and music theory in her native country. As a dancer, she has worked with choreographers such as Michèle Anne De Mey, Pierre Droulers, Felix Ruckert, Boris Charmatz. For five years, she has also been the choreographic assistant of Jérôme Bel and performer in his The Show Must Go On.
Olga began creating her own choreographic work in 1992, exploring different formats in numerous pieces. Since the end of the 1990s, her choreographies deal specifically with the role of memory in live art, questioning its value and lasting quality along two lines of research. The first centers on the study of physical memory through a pluralistic approach to dance and the body, in works such as anarborescences (Théâtre de la Cité internationale, Paris, 1999), Éclats mats (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2001), and INCORPORER ce qui reste ici au dans mon cœur (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2004 – 2009). The second axis explores works from the history of dance from the perspective of the perceptual memories of both spectators and dancers. The resulting projects, such as histoire(s) (Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels, 2004), An Introduction (Tanz Im August, Berlin, 2010), or Débords (Festival d’Automne, Paris, 2012), deal with documentation, testimony, archives, oral sources, narrative, and storytelling. Her recent work mixes the languages of choreography with those of documentary, performance, visual arts, and installation, playing with the porousness of those disciplines.
Olga’s choreographies have been presented in about twenty countries and she is regularly invited to teach at universities and lead workshops.
In 2013, de Soto was awarded the Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers — SACD Prize (Belgium), in the category of Performing Arts, for her artistic trajectory and her creative research on dance history, especially her work on Kurt Jooss’ The Green Table, Débords. The same year, Débords was also nominated for Prix de la Critique (BE). In 2019, her performance Mirage was nominated for the Prix Maeterlinck de la Critique in Belgium (French-speaking community), in the category of “Best Dance Performance”.