Ode et encore Company
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The Ode et encore / Regarding Art-Verein für polyartistische Kunst Company is based in Vienna and Strasbourg. Its work increasingly deals with an aesthetic and linguistic diversity, starting from a transdisciplinary approach, which is reflected in the artistic process developed by the company, “Choreography of a Sound Poetry”.
This practice combines several disciplines that Loulou Omer practices separately - dance, music and writing, particularly poetry - and explores their relationships and interactions by bringing them together in a single form.
The company's research, writing and artistic work draws inspiration and material from philosophical, historical and political reflections, thus generating projects that are explicitly or implicitly linked to the “situated place”, its history and identity.
This increasingly central question of cultural and geographical anchoring of the individual, his subjectivity, the question of autobiography and self-narrative in regards to the group and history, has awakened the desire and need to cross borders again and extend them to France. A country and a culture that is part of Loulou Omer's personal autobiography. France, her first artistic adoption country, also represents being different from her native Israel and the German-speaking culture in which she has lived for several years and works with a multicultural team of artists.
Due to its diverse and changing identity and its desire to question and highlight border areas at all levels, the company is oriented towards the border region of France, Région Grand Est. With this new orientation, the company intends to implement projects in the Grand Est region. Beyond the realization of their artistic work, the development of an artistic education and an exchange in closer relationship with the audience is desired and planned, and this should also be continued and actively developed in Vienna and Austria.
This development is also part of an emerging European and international dynamic that the company is developing to present its works and embrace new sustainable partnerships with cultural institutions.
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Originally from Israel, Loulou Omer is a dancer, choreographer, musician and poet. In Tel Aviv, she takes music and dance lessons as a child with the encouragement of her mother Zipporah Omer, herself being a dancer from an early age with the renowned avant-garde choreographer Gertrud Kraus.
At the age of 20, Loulou Omer joins the Israeli company “Nir Ben-Gal and Liat Dror Company” for a European tour, then arrives in Paris thanks to a grant from the Institut Français de Tel-Aviv to follow a training workshop with Maguy Marin.
Between 1992 and 1997, she lives between Paris and Brussels and takes further training courses with various choreographers (including Josef Nadj, the Pina Bausch company and Michèle Anne de Mey). It is in Brussels that she devotes herself entirely to her choreographic work, both solo and with other dancers and artists (Compagnie Mossoux-Bonté, Paul Wenninger, etc.).
In 1997, she is awarded with the 1st price of the “Festival des Jeunes Chorégraphes Contemporains de Pantin”. She does not return to live in Israel; she settles in Vienna where she pursues her artistic work.
Her relocation to Berlin in 2007 and then her return to Vienna in 2016 mark a turning point. During this period, and up until today, she has been incorporating into her choreographic practice other disciplines that she has practised in parallel for several years: writing, singing and musical composition. The Berlin years were particularly devoted to music and writing, especially poetry, which she had been immersed in all her childhood thanks to her father Ayin Hillel (Omer), a celebrated Israeli poet.
Her work increasingly takes a transdisciplinary approach, intertwining dance, music and poetry, and cultivating a multitude of aesthetics and languages. Questions of cultural and geographical rootedness - in relation to the individual, his or her subjectivity, autobiography and self-narration in relation to the group and History - are also taking on a central role.
It is this approach, drawn from the experience of the multitude - of arts, cultures and languages - has given rise to a particular working method, a philosophy and a practice: Choreography of sound poetry.
She creates poly-artistic pieces, integrating all these disciplines, which she presents in different theatres and festivals, notably “Fast ein Wunder - Reenacting Gertrud Kraus” (commissioned by Vienna's Theatermuseum, 2019) and presented amongst others at Impulstanz - International Dance Festival Vienna in 2021, as well as “Hinsichtlich der Frage” (2017) that premiered at Das Off Theater.
Loulou Omer collaborates with other artists, for her own projects or as associate artist. Some of them include visual and multimedia artists Simon Wachsmuth and Isa Rosenberger, percussionist Tobias Steinberger, her husband, film director and screenwriter Goran Rebic, and her sister, author and theatre director Tal Omer.
She is awarded the "2021 Exile Poetry Price" by Austrian association and publishing house Exil. e.V., jointly with the Literaturhaus in Vienna [AT].
In 2023, she is the recipient of a writing grant from the City of Vienna (Austria) for the “Rhapsodic Writing” project (one-year writing grant).She is currently working on the piece Curriculum Vitae and on the extended reprise of the play "Fast ein Wunder", Au hasard la mémoire.
© Goran Rebic