Romain Bigé

Public warm-up led by Boris Charmatz and Romain Bigé

3–4 pm
West Terrace, Main Floor
Join In · the audience is invited to participate

A double warm-up for bodies and minds. Whatever your physical condition, your age, or your familiarity with dance, come participate in this training, designed for an unlikely dance studio in the Barnes Foundation. Wild and experimental pedagogy on the menu! Begin with a dance warm-up by choreographer Boris Charmatz and end with a conceptual warm-up by philosopher Romain Bigé. One leads to the other: dance, by stretching our muscles, changes our sensations and ideas; philosophy, by stretching our ideas, changes our bodies. The mind, after all, is a muscle like any other. Come and practice dance and theory with us.

Romain Bigé (PhD) is a philosophy teacher, dance improviser, and scholar based in Angers, France. Holder of the agrégation professorship in philosophy, he received a PhD from the École Normale Supérieure for his work on the poetics of Contact Improvisation (Sharing Movement. A Philosophy of Gestures with Contact Improvisation), for which he also received an ENS Fellowship (2013) and a Fulbright grant (2017).

His dance training involves work with contemporary choreographers and improvisers in the US and in Europe including Matthieu Gaudeau, Lisa Nelson, Nancy Stark Smith, Charlie Morrissey, and Joaõ Fiadeiro. As a dramaturg, he has most notably supported the work of Czech stage director Linda Dušková. And as a performer, he has collaborated among others with Myriam Lefkowitz, Chris Aiken, and Boris Charmatz.

In 2014, he co-founded L'oeil et la main, a collective aimed at promoting dance, somatic, and academic practices around Contact Improvisation. Interested in the way movement practices shape sensory cartographies, he collaborates with Asaf Bachrach on the ICI Project—aka From Joint Improvisation to Interaction—a CNRS laboratory on neuroscience and danced improvisation.

He teaches philosophy to a variety of audiences, including children, high schoolers, college students, and dancers, bridging his experience and knowledge in philosophy, anthropology, and the arts.

He likes to roll on the ground.

Photo: Mathilde Rousseau