In November and December 2025, PenserDanser entrusted me with designing and leading a mentorship program for Bleu foncé: a project aimed at thinking democracy through the body, questioning politics through gesture, and turning dance into a tool for deliberation, dissensus, and co-creation. From the moment I began drafting the course plan, I envisioned a trajectory that extended far beyond theoretical transmission. The goal was to build a space in which political thought could be physically experienced, and where the body could become a site of reflection, resistance, and collective invention. The mentorship opened with a foundational question: what links democracy and dance? For me, this question established the basis for a deeply embodied pedagogy.
This cross-disciplinary approach—rooted in my background in art history, philosophy, and body studies—provided the dancer with a solid conceptual framework while supporting the development of a form of thinking that remained attuned to movement.
My role in Bleu foncé consisted in offering guiding principles, proposing critical readings, and above all accompanying the artist in shaping a vision: how to give form to democratic tensions, how to translate them into atmospheres, how to turn dark blue into a political material in its own right. This reflective framework enabled the project to become a rigorous yet poetic terrain, where dance emerged as a space for democratic experimentation.
The Bleu foncé mentorship concluded with two exceptional public sessions, offered free of charge to all on Sunday 7 December 2025 and Monday 8 December 2025. These gatherings marked the culmination of the work carried out throughout the project, exploring how individual research could be transformed into a genuinely democratic space where anyone could enter, participate, experiment, and contribute both to the creation and to the theorization of the project.
I conceived these public workshops as agoras in which dance became a way to build community, to think through the body, to negotiate forms, to share space, and to learn how to decide together. The aim was to open the dramaturgy to the collective, to embrace the malleability of the work through multiple presences, unexpected events, comments, contributions, and reactions, allowing co-created forms to emerge.
These two days enabled Bleu foncé to fully unfold its political and philosophical strength. The project was then shared with the wider public throughout the week of 7–11 December, through dance, philosophy, and music workshops offered generously and free of charge to all, without age restrictions, by the NPO PenserDanser.
Bleu foncé was among the projects selected for the 2025 edition of Espace René-Provost.
Choreographer-performer: Marguerite Ingenito
Composer and musician: Andrew Garfield Mills
Dance mentor and external eye: Sacha Ouellette-Deguire
Mentor in philosophy and art: Jessica Ragazzini