(IT/CH)

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Elena Boillat works as a interdisciplinary artist and performer within various contexts in the field of performing arts and independent culture, engaging in projects, collaborations, and experimental, pedagogical, and research-based processes. At the core of her practice is a radical exploration of the voice as an unstable, opaque, embodied, and non-linear material — a medium that communicates beyond codified language. Far from being a tool for fixed meaning, the voice becomes for the artist a living presence, a sonic device that disrupts, evokes, and challenges conventional structures of communication. The body, conceived as a resonating chamber, becomes a vehicle for the immaterial, the poetic, the invisible, and the ancestral. Through a trans-linguistic approach, Elena investigates the thresholds between corporeality, breath, vocal gesture, and space, generating an empathetic interaction with the audience and shaping perceptual experiences that transcend the verbal dimension.

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 one voice and one 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.​​

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