Rising Contemporary Dance Maker Némo Flouret’s Radical Creative Freedom

Zineb Soulaimani

Following in the footsteps of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Némo Flouret is shaking up the boundaries of contemporary dance, oscillating between a garage aesthetics and carnivalesque creativity. His pieces redefine space to better distort the present, sketching utopias where humans try to catch their breath.

Though Némo Flouret’s footsteps are soft, and his presence discreet, he’s been gaining a reputation for himself in the world of contemporary dance as an artist boldly forging his own path. His appetite for going against the grain began at the end of his studies at P.A.R.T.S., a prestigious art school founded by world-renowned Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. His graduation in 2019 was quickly followed by an invitation to join her company Rosas – what would be a career milestone for many performers. But Flouret declined her offer, a choice he says was rooted in his commitment to radical creative freedom. 

Instead of becoming her employee, Flouret would go on to become De Keersmaeker's collaborator, co-creating with the works Dark Red (2021) and Forêt (2022). “We were always on equal footing,” says Flouret. “She never tried to tell me what to do. The most important thing was to accept our differences.” Performed in the Louvre’s Galerie Denon, Forêt saw dancers bringing to life the gestures found in masterpieces by Titian, Da Vinci, and Veronese, embodying the tableaus of classical paintings through movement. Their choreography also dynamically interacted with the museum's iconic building – exploding, remixing, and expanding the boundaries between architecture, choreography, and visual art across time and space.

Even as a student, Flouret demonstrated this penchant for experimentation and unusual choices. His first piece, 900 Something Days Spent in the 20th Century, was created and performed in a parking lot, as studio space at P.A.R.T.S. was in short supply. Flouret describes this early endeavor as imbued with a profound, if unspoken, political undercurrent, devoid of overt slogans—a politics of subtle defiance through presence.

His artistic vernacular is constructed from these liminal spaces: between established institutions and overlooked urban landscapes, between the rigorous discipline of conservatories and the freedom of exploration, between the solitude of individual creation and the communal energy of a group. Flouret frequently invokes concepts like “intensity,” “danced logorrhea,” and a “mad race,” suggesting a creative point of view born from saturation and excess that comes to life through collective expression. 

The collective is a recurring theme in Flouret’s creative life – not as a homogeneous entity, but as a fragile, heterogeneous assembly of individuals. “It’s a kind of joint adventure,” he observes, “finding yourself together with all these people. We find shelter in dance and creation.” Philippe Quesne, Artistic Director of the Menagerie de Verre, a Parisian venue where Flouret and some of his collaborators have found a creative home, describes the group as "a brilliant generation that very quickly formed itself... into a ‘gang’.” He characterizes them as a resourceful, and exceptionally talented bunch, adept at reinterpreting traditional performance codes with playfulness and intentional instability. “There’s a kind of controlled savagery in the way they appropriate a space,” adds Quesne, who is designing the set for Flouret’s next piece. “They take over venues with gusto.”

Another core tenet of Flouret’s approach is a deliberate “unlearning,” especially of efficiency – a dominant logic of the contemporary age. Other aspects of his creative process speak directly to the sensibilities of his generation: one that embraces doubt, creates without explicit guarantees, and claims disorder as a methodological tool. “They blend urban influences, contemporary aesthetics and legacies... without ever imitating anyone,” Quesne notes. “It’s a living, nourished and inhabited synthesis.” This results in an aesthetic that might be described as thoughtful garage art – objects become instruments, and bodies sculpt sound. “They don’t just show dance,” remarks Quesne, “they show how it’s made.”

“For Némo, the creative process is just as important as the final product,” explains Flouret’s close collaborator Solène Wachter. Currently at work on Derniers Feux, scheduled to premiere at the 2025 Festival d’Avignon, Flouret’s inspirations for the piece range from French writer Jean Giono, to filmmaker Federico Fellini, to evocative memories of fireworks and trumpet music from his childhood. And, when we spoke in march he was also preparing to embark on an extended residency in a small village in Calabria, southern Italy, with the intention of embedding the local environment and its inhabitants into his creative process.

Stumbling – that moment when the body doesn’t quite know what it’s doing, but still does it – is something Flouret leans towards. It’s illustrative of something he seems to have a rare fondness for: failure. It's a form of humility that's part of the essence of his work: a dance that does not aspire to eternity, but to the immediacy of the present. A dance that does not seek to dazzle, but simply to exist, and then, with profound grace, to recede. Will Flouret prove to be a shooting star in the dance world? He himself doesn’t know where he’ll be in five years. What he does know is this: he wants to make the present inhabitable and “continue to discuss collectively so as not to get lost in this world.”

Zineb Soulaimani, originally from France and Morocco, has long been a project leader within national cultural institutions, and she has worked for the French Embassy in China. Her attention to the performing arts, performance and visual arts, as well as her interest in what the humanities can bring to artistic creation, have led her to create the podcast Le Beau Bizarre in 2021 – a long conversation with artists, curators or scholars working in today’s cultural landscape. She also works for Mouvement magazine and Le Quotidien de l’art.

Derniers feux
Choreography: Némo Flouret
from June 12 to 14 at the Comédie de Genève 
from July 19 to 25 at the festival d’Avignon

Forêt
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker & Némo Flouret
At the Louvre
Available on Arte Concert