The body that is there, wants to achieve complete possession of itself.Paul Valéry
Isabelle Beernaert is a striking woman with a southern temperament. Her Belgian father fell under the spell of an Italian-French woman. The couple settled in Kortrijk. That is where her cradle stood.
With a jazz musician father who also ran a record shop, and a warm-blooded Italian-French mother as antecedents, her artistic future was, so to speak, an obvious fact. Our DNA is all the same, but the potential for talent is not. She studied classical ballet, modern jazz, show jazz, pas de deux, mime, tango and Spanish and Bulgarian dance at the Royal Ballet School of Antwerp. This formed the foundation and the transition, an opening to what she had yet to master. She furthered her education with renowned mentors in urban dance styles such as hip hop, breakdance and ethnic dance styles including African and Indian dances. An impressive accumulation of the most diverse dance forms. It is these extremes that create exceptional moments, regardless of direction: classical or experimental. Dance remains the core. Only intrinsic quality matters. Mix this with her enthusiasm and you get pure passion. Contemporary dance, unlike classical ballet, is a continuous questioning of how movement can be used as an art form, on a spectrum from stillness to extreme virtuosity. As a creative jack-of-all-trades, her boundless energy cannot be confined to one box. Nowadays she is a choreographer for various production companies and events in the media, fashion and theatre worlds..
In the picture
Isabelle Beernaert became known to the general public through the striking choreographies she created for So You Think You Can Dance and her victory at The Ultimate Dance Battle. Triggered by the enormous potential of rising young talent, she decided to produce her own dance performances. After that first successful modern dance production 'Ne me quitte pas' came 'Et après' and 'Laat me'…. Performances full of passionate pain, but also zest for life. Isabelle Beernaert is a perseverer. Will alone is not enough. Not everyone can call themselves a choreographer. Talent is needed for that, a special gift. Crucial for a choreographer is having a particular sense for form-making. Her strength lies in bringing out the best in people. The least one can say about this dazzling and charismatic woman is that she has vision, inspiration and is a cultural entrepreneur. Through her many artistic wanderings, the public came to know an artist with demanding and ambitious projects. Performances at the crossroads of different disciplines. Her work breathes a unique modernity.
Authenticity
A great love of music is one thing. Isabelle Beernaert also sees music in relation to other art forms, but primarily as a physical journey through space with respect for the individual and respect for the audience. Music and dance thrive in her choreographies in a sensitive and organic way. In her dance performances, she works with a collective of young dancers who all receive a good part and who, under her inspiring influence, transcend themselves. Choreographies of a high artistic level with unprecedented physical strength and expressivity that manage to convince and move. Partly confrontational, but also with an unexpected poetic richness. The imperfect and the vulnerable are a constant. Dance performances with body that creeps under your skin and appeal to different generations. For that broad reach, Isabelle Beernaert has no fixed recipe. She chooses music with depth, a pure display of emotions. Everything revolves around those emotions. You feel, this is made by a woman who stands in life with every fiber. It is simply the alertness of observing, of the ego in the world. In doing so, she understands the art of maintaining the balance between masculine testosterone and feminine estrogen. She embraces the music, in which, just as in her dance vocabulary, there are few or no boundaries. With an aversion to kitsch, she knows how to choose the perfect songs, chansons and instrumental music. The fragments are connected into a coherent story. That combined with her imagination creates a whole series of highlights. Condensation and intensity are a constant. Isabelle Beernaert knows how to create the feeling of a slice of life by putting various music and dance styles into perspective and giving them a theatrical dimension.The role of a choreographer
Choreographers inspire, stimulate and motivate to view dance in relation to different subjects and themes, think about them and put them into practice. Dancing stimulates engaging different intelligences: verbal, physical, musical, spatial and interpersonal. She makes people happy with dance and music. I think it has to do with the readability and audience-friendliness of the performances. They are never flatly commercial and carry great recognizability in them. Her choreographies are flashy and physical, associative and fragmented in construction. The irresistible expressive power of music is her alter ego. An artist touches us when he succeeds in nestling an image between images, a feeling between impressions.Thousands of people in the Netherlands and Flanders have already enjoyed her dance performances.
Soon there will be several performances of hers to see at various locations, first 'Naakt Nuda Veritas' on 17 October in Genk, 24 October in Antwerp, 29 October in Ghent and on 31 October in Ostend. Check the agenda for other dates. Her latest production 'Oxytocin' will premiere on 24 November in the Elisabethzaal in Antwerp.