Cindy Van Acker

Cindy Van Acker trained in classical dance and has been creating her own pieces since 1994. In 2002 she founded the company Cie Greffe in Geneva and made a name for herself on the international dance scene with her solo Corps 00:00. Her meticulous style, in which slowness, mentalization, geometry, minimalism and the spatialization of sound combine, unfolds in a unique territory. During the last 20 years, in which she has alternated between powerful solos and gripping group pieces and has also developed choreography for opera productions, she has succeeded in creating a dance language that is essentially abstract yet nevertheless always directly linked to the concept of struggle and resistance — the Flemish ‘strijd’. Cindy Van Acker’s artistic trajectory has been shaped by her encounters with the choreographer Myriam Gourfink, the electronic musician Mika Vainio, the set designer and visual artist Victor Roy and the director Romeo Castellucci. Since November 2017 Cindy Van Acker has been an ‘Artiste associé’ with the Association pour la Danse Contemporaine (ADC) in Geneva. She has received numerous honours for her work, including two Swiss dance awards and the bestowal of the rank of Chevalière de la Légion d’honneur. In 2023 she received the Grand Prix suisse des arts de la scène / Anneau Hans Reinhart.

In 2005 Romeo Castellucci invited Cindy Van Acker to represent Switzerland at the Venice Biennale with Corps 00:00. This first encounter led the two to collaborate on Inferno and Purgatorio (after Dante) at the Festival d’Avignon in 2008. The collaboration has continued with several opera productions: Parsifal (2011) and Die Zauberflöte (2018) at La Monnaie in Brussels, Moses und Aron (2015) at the Paris Opéra, Tannhäuser (2017) at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich and Salome (2018), Don Giovanni (2021) and Orff’s De temporum fine comoedia (2022) at the Salzburg Festival. In 2021 Cindy Van Acker invited Romeo Castellucci to collaborate with her on the group piece Without references. Most recently she was the choreographer for Castellucci’s productions of Das Rheingold (2023) and Die Walküre (2024) at La Monnaie.