Why do I dance?
I dance to draw connections and open up encounters. Dancing helps me put questions in motion and I enjoy inviting people to find their own answers. What dance is, does and means to me evolves hand-in-hand with my personal, professional and artistic development.
From theatres and galleries to outdoor and online spaces, I move across community and professional settings to carve a balanced practice. With my long limbs, I long to use dance as a link between humans; between movement and sound; and between people and places.
Recent Projects
Poetry in motion
For me, contemporary dance is to movement what poetry is to literature. Whether narrative or conceptual, coherent or confusing, contemporary dance has artistic license to create its own grammar.
The beauty of its indefinable style is that it emerges from each individual’s taste, personal story, abilities and encounters with others. Always reinventing itself, it is the most adaptable dance form of all.
Choreography
I see choreography as the art of shaping ideas in space and time to share them with communities. I nurture this immaterial craft through repetitions until its ephemeral realisation, the performance event.
In practice, I choreograph solos, duets and groups works for and with young people, amateur and professional dancers. In some cases, each step is set. In others, my choreographic scores are made of open-ended tasks. Always structured, I rehearse, refine and record choreography using timelines, descriptions, videos and stick figures. The traces of this intangible craft are archived, sometimes revisited and restaged long after their creation, ensuring the transmission of my vision through motion.
Reviews
Yanaëlle, this was the first time seeing you dance, and what a pleasure it was! Your patience with the time and movement in your piece was truly captivating!
Audience member
Surfaces (2021)
Yanaëlle has a gift for finding magic in the seemingly mundane or overlooked
Audience member
The Performance Path (2022)
I especially liked the play on distance, perspective and angles
Audience member
Garden Unlocked (2022)
her mastery of mood is assured and she is not afraid of stillness
Reviewer Neil Norman
Play On (2019)
The entire piece was engaging throughout and with the tremendous integrity of the subtleties of movement and choreography as a whole, I was captivated by not only what I could see but even by what I couldn’t.
Audience member
Swapping Shadows (2018)
I was gently swept away by the visuals: smooth shapes, loose tumbles and harmonious lines with effective, uncomplicated lighting.
Reviewer Stephanie Brown
Swapping Shadows (2018)
Yanaëlle Ritter 