Biography
Annabel Guérédrat is a choreographer, performer, researcher and “bruja”, or Caribbean witch. Born in New Caledonia, she lives and works in Martinique, where her roots are and where she has established her company, Artincidence. She first did various training courses on butoh, pilates, yoga, ladja, krump and also kyudo, a kind of Japanese archery combining martial art and the practice of zen. She is also a practitioner of Body-Mind Centering®, a somatic practice that enables her to write organic performances fusing the intimate and the political. She had three seminal encounters in 2010 with Meredith Monk, Keith Hennessy and Anna Halprin, which gave rise to her performance solo A freak show for S., a tribute to the Black Venus, Saartjie Baartman. Particularly inspired by the energy of Valeska Gert’s “dancing witch”, Annabel Guérédrat has created modern witch figures in Valeska and you (2015), Hystéria (2017) and I’m a bruja (2018). Her main field of interest is the political body and the social stance of Black and mixed-race women in the Caribbean; as well as grungy ecofeminism and dark ecology, through the toxic sargassum seaweed that regularly washes up on the Atlantic coast of Martinique, and in which she buries herself for “care” rituals. In parallel to her creative work, she runs dance-based outreach actions for prostitutes and prisoners and in educational, medical and socio-humanitarian settings.
With visual artist Henri Tauliaut, she co-founded the International Festival of Performance Art (FIAP) in Martinique in 2017, and they have since co-curated it, creating four performance worlds: aqua, iguana, afropunk and technochaman.