(IT/CH)

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Elena Boillat is an Italian/Swiss multidisciplinary artist and performer.

Her practice revolves around sound, breath and vocality as something that lies at the origin of a whole, dedicating herself to the different facets of the human voice in order to explore its limits, symptoms and several manifestations. Through a trans-linguistic practice, Elena uses the body as a veritable sounding board of the immaterial, the invisible and the ancestral: gesture, voice, gaze, listening, respiration and silence come together to give life to extended performative acts where space and time are intensified. Her work is connected to various realities in the field of performing arts and independent culture with projects, collaborations and experimental, pedagogical and research processes

She graduated in Disciplines of Art, Music and Entertainment at the University of Florence in 2012. Afterwards graduated as a dancer and performer at the Paolo Grassi Academy in Milan (2014). As a researcher of voice and breathing techniques, she is also a certified ATT® method teacher (Rome 2024).

She has trained with many international masters and choreographers such as Maria Consagra, Luciana Melis, Dominique Dupuy, Enzo Cosimi, Ariella Vidach, Kuniaki Ida and with Atsushi Takenouchi, with whom she approached butoh dance.

In 2015 she made her debut in Switzerland as choreographer and performer with the solo La forme de l’âme (in collaboration with the director F. Rosso), writing a body dramaturgy on the original voice of the contemporary philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy specially recorded for the project starting from his 59 indices on the body. The performance has been guested at several international festivals, such as the Modern Body Festival in Netherlands (2016) and the Electronica Nova Music Festival in Poland(2025). Her project Mimesis (2017), an installation for a single spectator, won the cantonal call for bids for cultural mediation in dance, promoted by DECS Ticino and Reso Dance network) selected like national project for the Tanz Fest (2019). She was also selected by Pro Helvetia for the Camping master class program at the Paris CND (2019). Within the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland she is the co-founder of the cultural policy movement Ticino is burning (Swiss Performing Arts Award 2022). Starting in 2023, Elena has been engaging in her first authorial work, starting a research on acoustic vocal range and phonation, which has led her to P A R T I T U R A Z E R O - a performative act supported by PREMIO Schweiz ’24.​​

She currently collaborates with a section of the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan for a project/atelier about the concept of the empty space and the vulnerability of the human body's presence into it.

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