Julie Nioche

Born in 1976, she lives in Paris – choreographer, artictic director of A.I.M.E. - Association d’Indivivdus en Mouvements Engagés – (Associations of Moving and Committed Individuals)
Holder since 1995 of a diploma from the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse in Paris, she worked as a performer with Odile Duboc. She then joined the companies of Hervé Robbe, Meg Stuart, Alain Michard, Catherine Contour, Emmanuelle Huynh, Alain Buffard, Jennifer Lacey.
From 1996 to 2007 she is the co-director of the Fin novembre association. She takes part in the association’s collective projects and initiates her own projects in the framework of their artistic residencies at the national stage Le Manège in Reims from 2000 to 2004 and at the Ménagerie de Verre in Paris from 2005 to 2007.
Since 2006 she is an « associated artist » to the art centre Le Consortium in Dijon and to the Scène Conventionnée du Vivat in Armentières from 2008 to 2010.

Julie Nioche is an artist held amongst several worlds and realities, notably contemporary creation, research, and the medical and scientific spheres. In 2000 she starts studying psychology, takes a formation in osteopathy, and joins in a number of medical ethics colloquia.
Today she questions the “territory” of dance and the conveyance of this practise in other contexts such as architecture, the medical sphere, or the field of education, in which the body should be given much more space.
In search of another way to deem the Sensible in our everyday life, and in order to expand her artistic, aesthetic and social inquiries surrounding the body, Julie Nioche anchors these projects in various environments. They hence take different shapes, and ceaselessly actualise the hybridisation of spring and knowledge.
More precisely, it is the notion of “the body’s image” that inscribes the meeting point of significative tension between the artistic practise and health sciences. Julie Nioche’s projects all question one way or the other the body’s limits in a physical, psychic or symbolic point of view.
The “X” installation, which gave birth to the show “XX with alice” focusing on the disorders that our image of the body initiates, was extended in the form of a workshop with female patients suffering from alimentary behaviour disturbance at the Dijon University hospital.
The “La Sisyphe” creation, studying the body’s limits through physical exhaustion, was linked to a workshop held with cerebral motor disabled children in a rehabilitation centre in Reims.
Moreover, to carry out the performance “Les Sisyphe x 10”, which is a de-multiplication of the solo, Julie Nioche developed with Gabrielle Mallet a workshop allying dance and physiotherapy, and addressed to teenage non-dancers.
In 2005, the “H2O-NaCl-CaCO3” show, questioning the blurred limits of the body within space, led Julie Nioche and the architect Virginie Mira to the conception of workshops inside an architecture school.
The 2007-2008 creation named “Matter” is an inquiry on the construction of feminine physicality with four female artists from different countries. Through the dissolution of their clothing with water, the women will give their body a consistency of sensual as well as derisory material reality. The massage praxis and the relation to the water element take full part in the creation process. An extension of this work will be carried out in a psychiatric hospital with schizophrenic patients.

This whole research has been the starting point of several seminars, such as “Etudes” (“Studies”) at the Ménagerie de verre in 2002, “Autour de l’image du corps” (“Around the body’s image”), an annual seminar held at the dance department of Paris 8 University since 2003 in collaboration with Isabelle Ginot, Gabrielle Mallet and Christine Roquet.

Each of Julie Nioche’s artistic propositions is at a crossroads of several exploration fields and various imaginaries.
That’s one important reason why she creates in 2007 her own structure : A.I.M.E. (Association d’Individus en Mouvemens Engagés) to support all these projects crossing different domains : art, medical sphere, university, associations..