Dalila Belaza

As a child, Dalila Belaza didn’t dance, she listened. Storytelling, passed down through oral tradition in the family circle, infuses her imagination and gives her a taste for storytelling. These stories, the cradle of her practice, come to life on stage through her bodies. Far from being mute, her dance allows us to see the story that has inhabited her, like a mirror held up to the landscape : “the starting point of an endless interior expansion without return of a road that takes shape, of landscapes that manifest themselves, of everything that didn’t exist the moment before me”. (1)

Dalila Belaza has been ploughing her way through this once forbidden and forever foreign territory for almost thirty years. An finitely fertile path, nourished by an immediate intuition: dance will be neither a means of seduction, nor a factory of spectacular images, nor an outlet. Like a tightrope walker, it seeks to understand what eludes us, while evading any attempt at definition. Dance is a mystery in motion. By working on the disposition and availability of the body, in terms of posture, breath and relationship to space, she shapes each gesture to turn entirely towards listening. “Dalila Belaza notes that she has always considered “the work space as a sacred space”, showing particular respect for what was to be experienced : a pure act freed [from herself]-self”. (2)

Her approach, guided by a need for meaning and elevation, is above all a movement of research: that of giving substance to the invisible and the troubled, in order to plunge spectators and performers into the experience of what is within them. By turning her gaze inwards, Dalila Belaza does not dance in a closed way. The deep memories of the body, inhabited by a limitless inner space, make intimacy a whole world to be explored.

I’m looking for the intimate, mysterious and unchanging story that lies dormant within us, that speaks to us in an essential sense and that can bring us together. To do this, I create the conditions that allow us to open up and question our intimacy, as if to extract from it a reinvented human story. Dalila Belaza

She first explored this territory alongside her sister, the choreographer Nacera Belaza, with whom she shares the same rigor and approach to the body as a phenomenon among other phenomena. They are forever united by their vision of dance as an inner journey, a vertical dive, and an opaque but essential language. As a performer and privileged artistic partner in her sister’s eponymous company, Dalila was like an alter ego in Nacera’s company for twenty years. On a trip to the Aveyron region in 2019, she encountered alterity through the folk dance group Lous Castelous. Propelled by a deep sense of certainty, she knew that the time had come to explore a new world as a choreographer and performer. She subsequently created a space for herself, hiya compagnie.

Dance exists by resonating, which is why the company’s first three productions—Au cœur, Figures, and Rive—form a coherent throughline extending from a deep intellectual exploration that Belaza began well before founding the company. Her imagination, an inexhaustible well of meaning, imbues her works with the same core intention: to create meeting points between the memory of folk rituals and the vocabulary of contemporary dance in order for a third territory to emerge, one in which dance becomes a universal and timeless language.

On path of her imagination, Dalila Belaza stops off at La Briqueterie – CDCN du Val-de-Marne, where she will be associate artist from 2024 to 2026. In 2025, she will give shape her next creation, Orage.

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(1), Dalila Belaza

(2), Frédérique Villemur, Entre deux rives, Actes Sud, 2018

(3), Biography written by Clara Colson