Ghyslaine Gau
Creative Crossroads Cycle Two 2025–2026
Born in Marseille to Martinican parents, Ghyslaine Gau is a dancer researcher and performer.
She joined the professional programme at the choreographic center in Montpellier in 1998.
For more than a decade, Gau has consistently engaged with marginalized communities, collaborating on projects with psychiatric hospitals, medical-educational centers and prisons.
Motherhood in 2004 deepened her exploration of heritage transmission, blending Afro-feminism, Taoist philosophy, psychoanalysis and somatic practices. Her work interrogates intimacy from a decolonial perspective.
Living between Berlin, Montpellier and Martinique, she brings a global perspective to her practice, drawing from a wide range of cultural and intellectual traditions.
As part of the Creative Crossroads Programme, she is working on the S.U.T.U.R.E project, which combines research on internal cartographies and research fieldwork with displaced persons.
Ghyslaine Gau in residence at ICI–CCN in Montpellier
Creative Crossroads Residency 2025
Working on her upcoming production – S.U.T.U.R.E, Ghyslaine Gau is in residence at ICI–CCN / Agora in Montpellier.
Originally from the Caribbean islands and raised in the suburbs of Paris, her creations navigate between worlds. Trained in dance at the regional conservatory of Cergy-Pontoise and then at the Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier (directed by Mathilde Monnier), she cultivates an Afro-feminist and decolonial approach. As a performer, choreographer and artist working with marginalised audiences, her use of different media and practices is always combined with the dancing body. Having become the foundation of her research – thanks to its poetic, political and spiritual qualities – it remains, in her eyes, the primary locus of transformation.
A meeting point between experience and imagination, transparency and opacity, the functional and the symbolic, the long-term project – S.U.T.U.R.E brings together two formats that give credence to movements that diffract and bring together: ÉCLATS and SOURD BOUCAN. In parallel with fieldwork carried out by Landscapes in Motion in the Cévennes, where the notion of territory is examined through the experience of people in exile, Ghyslaine Gau is creating a performance and sound installation: SOURD BOUCAN. Together with artist Lola Rubio, she transforms the trumpet into a third organ. An extension of the body, an amplifier of the voice, allowing the most intimate part of their memories to resonate.