Cécile Thery
Cécile Thery is a French dancer, choreographer, teacher, art therapist and film-maker.
With a Master’s degree in clinical psychology, a post-graduate diploma in mediated psychiatry, art and creativity and a Master’s degree in dance anthropology, she has built her career as an artist between the sensitive and the social.
In 2000, she went to Burkina Faso to take an intensive course in traditional dance with Irène Tassembedo and dancers from the National Ballet. She discovered the ‘Dialogue de corps’ festival, organised by the Compagnie Salia ni Seydou, which introduced a whole generation of young dancers to contemporary dance. On her return to France, she joined the Ivory Coast Traditionnal Dances group N’Zassa, directed by Clément Assemian and Tobi Voli. She continued her training in France and Africa with Germaine Acogny, Vincent Mantsoe, Seydou Boro, Nora Chipaumire and Franck Michelletti. As a performer, she has worked with the Lyon-based companies Chenêt-Danse, XLR Project, Teguerer, and with the Saint-Etienne-based company Litecox, she has created performances in the public space. In 2021, she was assistant choreographer to Sayouba Sigué, for Afriquarqs, during the Lyons Dance Festival Parade. Travelling regularly throughout Africa, she has taken part in numerous international contemporary dance festivals, sharing the living and working conditions of dancers and meeting emerging figures in African contemporary dance, which she portrayed in her documentary Dance for Change, released in 2018 (Production Temps Kono – GnamaGnama Production). For the 2023 Cultural Olympiad and the 2024 Paralympic Games, she is collaborating on the creation of ‘CINQ!’, in partnership with the Litecox company from Saint-Étienne, with the support of Saint-Étienne Métropole.
Moving towards greater body awareness, Cécile Thery incorporates other body practices into her approach and trains in Pilates and yoga. With Cie TK, she is developing her choreographic work and asserting her multi-disciplinarity by combining body and text and building tailor-made projects inspired by different places and audiences. Her artistic approach is based on the experience of mixing and hybridity, with music as an essential component. As a choreographer, she leads amateur projects such as Mai 68 and Entrez dans la danse, in which she questions the place of women in the public space. Her research about the status of women has led her to stage and perform texts from Ferite a morte by Italian playwright Serena Dandini, a general reflection on domestic violence.
In 2023, she continued her research into text and the body by creating Marie, le reste c’est de la poésie: the story of an intimate, poetic and political reconstruction, for a dancer, actress and musician.
She works with so-called ‘excluded’ audiences (women who are victims of domestic violence, people with disabilities, new arrivals) and is involved in professional art therapy training for health care schools (speech therapy, nursing) and the Youth Judicial Protection).
In 2024, accompanied by actor and co-director Noël Faure, she created Pas à pas, a short dance dance with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, as part of the DEAT42 programme set up by the Ove Foundation in Saint-Étienne.
