Salomé Mimouni is a Strasbourg-based choreographic artist, from a French family with, on one side, Algerian Jewish and Alsatian roots, and on the other, Italian roots. After nine years between France and Latin America, she developed a choreographic language inspired by hip-hop, African and contemporary dances. Trained in hip-hop and related dance forms between 2010 and 2016 with Strasbourg-based companies including Mémoires Vives, MJD and Mira, she initially chose to step away from dance professionally and earned a master’s degree in Political Science.
Without ever stopping dancing, through hip-hop training, masterclasses and projects as a performer, she decided to devote herself fully to dance after COVID. She moved to Chile, where she developed her career as a dancer-performer and choreographer between 2021 and 2024. She joined the companies MAE, Ser Andante and El Límite de lo Propio, working across hip-hop, contemporary dance and circus.
In 2023, she initiated her first solo project, Guelma, archive de corps qui dansent. The solo was hosted in creative residency at NAVE in Santiago, Chile. Back in France in 2025, she continues to develop and tour the project.
Thursday, July 23, 2026 at 7:30 pm at Le BLOCK · CCNR.
Free upon reservation:
adriana.falcone@ccnr.fr
Salomé Mimouni will lead a Next Move workshop on Monday, July 20, 2026 at 7:00 pm.
Several stories, several eras, one body on stage. In 1940, in Guelma, colonial Algeria, a woman prepares herself at dawn, puts on men’s clothing and traces the first gestures of an intimate revolt. In 2025, in France, her descendant, in search of identity, confronts the legacy of uprooting and patriarchal oppression.
Through dance, silences and absences, these stories, inherited or lived, become intertwined. The scenography gradually reveals itself, opening up a space of transformation, until a collective euphoria emerges, where the audience is invited to dance in a kitsch setting that calls for a celebration free from questions of taste, a letting go that brings us closer to the simple liberation of dancing together. Between imaginary archives, humour and poetry, Guelma explores, through movement, clothing and music, the way our ancestors’ stories move through our bodies and our contemporary struggles. The piece questions the possibility of joyfully reclaiming our stories of exile and struggle as a form of collective survival.
Guelma, archive de corps qui dansent is the danced story of our exiles, our struggles and our liberations.
The dancing bodies are the bodies of those who migrated, went into exile, resisted. They are living ancestors, whose history made my own possible. They dance exile: yesterday’s, today’s and perhaps tomorrow’s too, through my own body and experience.
How can I tell my story when I do not know it myself? So I invent. I reclaim a history as I imagine it, or as I would like it to be: halfway between past, present and future, where the struggles, dreams and contradictions of identity become intertwined.
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Guelma is a city in Algeria, the city where my grandfather was born. A city I have never seen, but whose name lives within me. Guelma is a sensation, a blurred memory, an imagined land. It is the starting point for a personal story, that of a woman whose origins have been blurred by exile, shaped within a patriarchal system, searching for one thing: freedom.
What if my story were also the story of many others?
From this intimate quest, I want to create a choreographic piece that is clear and accessible, one that speaks to others, that tells a story, and in which each person can recognise themselves. A danced narrative, to make our memories, our inheritances and our desires for freedom visible.
Choreographer & performer: Salomé Mimouni
Music: Luis Manríquez
Lighting: Kim Chowanek
Costumes: Naomi Galima
Directing assistant: Selma Kalt
Production: Compagnie Ardentes
Co-production & support: Le BLOCK · CCN de Rillieux-la-Pape, La NEF, Wissembourg, France, L’Illiade, Illkirch-Graffenstaden, France, NAVE, Santiago, Chile, NAU IVANOW, Barcelona, Spain, more to be announced
Premiere: date to be announced
Photo © Francisca Saenz
