Soa Ratsifandrihana is a dancer and choreographer. After studying at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, Soa worked with James Thierrée, Salia Sanou and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. In October 2021, she presented her first solo show g r o o v e in Brussels. The show has been performed more than 40 times and continues to tour Europe. In parallel, Soa has created a diptych in May 2024, in which she tells a story she would have liked to have heard. The two parts of this diptych take the form of a radio production, Rouge Cratère, and a show entitled Fampitaha, fampita fampitàna. Following on from her first solo, she is interested in the possible entanglements between radio narrative, choreographic and musical composition, reminding us that our bodies, just like our words, are the carriers of stories. From 2023 to 2025, Soa is an associated artist at Kaaitheater in Brussels.

It was only at last year’s festival that Soa Ratsifandrihana took the Volkstheater stage for the great Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, showing off both her technical precision and electrifying presence in Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich. This year, her solo introduces us to her talent as a choreographer: g r o o v e is a dialogue with two musicians, Sylvain Darrifourcq and Alban Murenzi, and their very different soundscapes. How can dance conduct such a varied conversation “while remaining faithful to its own temporality”? Dance styles like the Madagascan Afindrafindrao and the Madison are picked up and recomposed to form a unique and exacting movement language – “a continuous game of things that are tied and untied”.