New choreographic universes by Valeria Giuga and the dance company Labkine

In 1998, Noëlle Simonet set up Labkine to create pieces and develop projects in relation to the repertoire of modern and contemporary pieces noted in Laban kinetography.  

This  « literature » offers a choice of works from various periods and origins, providing a wide variety of movement and ideas. Labkine defends this access to culture as an essential support to better approach and appreciate diversity and contemporary creativity, opening fields of movement exploration. 

Valeria Giuga joined Labkine in 2016 with an innovative and committed project, in connection with the musical scores written in Laban kinetography.

For the last five years she has been creating the choreographic pieces and designing the artistic projects of the company. In all her projects, the artist extracts raw material from the score sources of famous choreographers and from the fundamental principles of the movement analysis system developed by Rudolf Laban.  

Valeria Giuga treats dance as a text, she feeds on and builds on existing scores and creates new ones with a new choreographic writing process in which words and movement are mixed. For each of her pieces, she works with a contemporary author.  

From contemporary poetry, she borrows writing processes and certain figures of speech that she applies to her choreographic writing process: accumulation, repetition, paraphrase, suspension. From this constrained writing, Valeria Giuga proposes a pure, embodied, resolutely contemporary gesture.  

She questions the body of yesterday and the bodies of today and puts the concept of memory(ies) in the centre of her pieces: memory of the rote, memory of gestures and the body, historical memory, collective memory.  

Labkine also aims to implement pedagogical actions and tools that enable the richness and variety of movement contained in the repertoire to be passed on to dancers, creators, students and dance lovers. By appropriating the works, the dancer or student enriches his or her sensitive knowledge, body vocabulary and direct, living experience of the works to question his or her own approach.  

Labkine éditions has produced three pedagogical multimedia books to discover the fundamentals of Labanian movement in the collection « La partition chorégraphique, outil de transmission, outil d’exploration »: #01 Le croquis de parcours in 2013, #02 Transferts et tours in 2015 and #03 Corps-Espace in 2019 (in French and English version).