Biography
Mélanie Jolly is a dancer and practitioner certified in Eutony Gerda Alexander®.
After years of learning ballet, then contemporary dance at the Poitiers Conservatoire, she has developed an interest for improvisation and especially Contact Improvisation. With Claire Filmon, with whom she trained for many years, she discovered how a relationship with oneself and with the others can emerge from listening to the moment, body consciousness and perceptions, and found great pleasure in movement. She continued her training by following workshops, notably with Nancy Stark-Smith, Andrew De Lotbinière Harwood, Karim Sebbar, Hervé Diasnas, Valérie Lamielle, Lê Quan Ninh, and Clara Cornil.
She took interest in other practices such as Body Mind Centering® with Elise Bernard, Axis Syllabus with Antoine Ragot, AFCMD with Nathalie Schulmann.
Very attracted to singing, she has also followed several workshops with Daïnouri Choque, David Hykes (harmonic singing), Géraldine Keller and Claire Bergerault (vocal improvisation). She sang in the Chamber Choir of the Vienne Département.
She participates in instant composition research groups and enjoys collaborating on multidisciplinary projects.
In 2013, she started training in Eutony Gerda Alexander®, a somatic education practice. There she found the essence of what has been fascinating her for so many years: an ever deeper knowledge of oneself through the body and movement, clarifying her interest in body awareness as a source of dance expression. Here, her educational qualities had been refined to guide each and everyone in their relationship with their body. She graduated in May 2018.
At the beginning of the Collectif Zone d’Appui Provisoire, she has developed her work within this dance company since 2010, both as a dancer, researcher in movement and as a teacher. She works with various audiences: children, adults and adults with disabilities, sharing her passion for body knowledge and the liberation of expression through movement. She also teaches Contact Improvisation in Poitiers and elsewhere, and participated in European meetings of Contact Improvisation teachers – ECITE – in 2015, 2016 and 2018.