Marie-Caroline Hominal

Marie-Caroline Hominal

Outstanding Female Dancer 2019

Franco-Swiss dancer Marie-Caroline Hominal was born in 1978 and began her dance training with her mother at the Janet Held Studio in Montreux before attending the Swiss professional ballet school in Zurich. At the age of 15 she went to the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Art in London, where she was a member of the National Youth Dance Company during her final year. Beginning in 1998 she danced in various companies, including at the Tanztheater Basel under Joachim Schlömer, with Giselle Vienne, Blanca Li, Gilles Jobin and La Ribot, and in Marco Berrettini’s duo “iFeel2”. She performed in William Forsythe’s “Human Writes” and in “B.O.B.” by Dick Wong. In 2002 she began creating her first independent works, mainly solos and duos such as “Fly Girl” (2008), “Froufrou” and “Le Triomphe de la Renommée”, a one-to-one performance in the artist lodge of a theatre (both 2013); “Ballet” (2014) and “Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr” (2018). Since 2008 she has toured worldwide, performing her works in both theatres and galleries.

In her unique choreographies, Marie-Caroline Hominal works with text, music, dance, performance and video, in part through collaborations both in Switzerland and abroad, for example on 2009’s “Duchesses” with François Chaignaud. Her video works, such as “Bleu Foncé” (2008), have been presented at various festivals, while a four-minute short film created in 2018 for the Eurockéennes rock festival in Belfort was shown on the Franco-German TV channel arte. The repertoire of “MadMoiselle MCH” is tragic, comic, melancholic or eccentric, depending on the theme. For Marie-Caroline Hominal, dance is a place of transformations and metamorphoses of the body. “Taxi-Dancers” (2016), which she performs together with Teresa Vittucci and Ivan Blagajčević, “Hominal/Öhrn” (2018) and her most recent piece “Hominal/Xaba” with the South African performer Nelisiwe Xaba from the series “Hominal/xxxx” will be shown at the Théâtre Vidy after the première at the La Bâtie Festival in Geneva at the end of August 2019.

Alexandre Demidoff, jury member:

“Marie-Caroline Hominal is exceptional in many ways. Only when you’ve heard her caterwauling like one of the living dead, a mask of horror on her face, in ‘Hominal/Öhrn’, or admired her as she takes on voodoo spirits in ‘Froufrou’, can you appreciate the power of her interpretation, her gift for metamorphosis. For her, dance is a movement towards an elsewhere, a sometimes whole-body experience of otherness; she is guided solely by intellectual, ethnological and poetic curiosity. Hominal fuses impeccable technique with often astonishing inventiveness. She weaves spells that have a lasting impact, in Switzerland and abroad.”