compagnie O.

The choreographer, video artist and researcher Marie Alexis was born in France in 1981 and has been based in Zurich since 2000. After training in contemporary dance in Zurich and London and in Life/Art Process according to Anna Halprin, she worked as a freelance dancer in Switzerland and abroad. Since 2017, she has focussed on her own artistic and artistic-scientific work. She is interested in researching social dynamics and sketching utopias and dystopias. She is also interested in the interface between art, theory and philosophy as well as the topic of neurodiversity. In 2020, she completed her master’s degree in choreography at the ZHdK and subsequently received the scholarship for young researchers at the IPF of the ZHdK. In 2021, she received a cultural award from the City of Zurich in the field of dance and took part in the Double Dance Mentoring Project of Migros Culture Percentage with Annie Hanauer as her mentor. As a neurodivergent artist, she deals with questions of inclusion and accessibility in the context of independent cultural creation. In addition to her own artistic work, she works as a freelance dramaturge and video artist and is active in cultural policy as a board member of TanzLOBBY IG Tanz Zürich.

After studying architecture in Munich and Milan, Ivalina Yapova, born and raised in Bulgaria, gained valuable experience as a design architect at renowned Zurich architecture firms over a period of six years. Her critical and interdisciplinary thinking, the need for experimentation and the questioning of social and economic structures, as well as her love of dance and performative practices led her to compagnie O. in 2017, where she works as a scenographer, performer, co-director and board member. In 2024, she completed her master’s degree in theatre (specialising in stage design) at the ZHdK and received the Roman Clemens Prize as an award for her final project «All Tabs». She works as a freelancer in the fields of architecture, scenography and lighting design. Both on a theoretical level and in her work as a designer of performance venues and situations, she is concerned with the reciprocal relationships between social and physical space. Beyond aesthetic and formal design, she is always looking for experimental arrangements and spatial practices that promote the testing of sensitive processes of mutual rapprochement and distance between those present.