Expressing Resistance and Self-Determination Through Dance
French dance artist Nach named new Valeska Gert Visiting Professor / Opening event on October 28, 2026, at Akademie der Künste
№ 126/2026 from Oct 20, 2026
The French dancer and choreographer Nach has been appointed Valeska Gert Visiting Professor at Freie Universität Berlin for the 2026/2027 winter semester. Since 2017, Nach and her dance company have been fusing the gestural language of Krump – an improvisational dance culture that emerged in Los Angeles in the early 2000s – with narratives of world and self as told by a Black female body keen to avoid being typecast. As the Valeska Gert Guest Professor, Nach is dedicated to practice-based research into the power of the marginalized, their narratives, and their independent, self-assured and resistant creativity. Nach’s semester as visiting professor will be marked by an opening event at the Akademie der Künste on Wednesday, October 28, 2026, from 7:00 p.m., where she will give a talk on “The Powerful Margins: Dance of Struggles and Bodies of Resistance.” The talk will provide glimpses into her art, her study of movement, protest, and memory, and her choreographic writing.
Self-portrait of the French dance artist
Image Credit: Nach
From her childhood in Bobigny in a family of Senegalese, Cape Verdean, and Vietnamese heritage, Nach recalls the constant presence of music and dance in social and community life. Nach was first exposed to Krump in Lyon in 2008, and this propelled her into dance. She soon became a professional dance artist, working as a performer for contemporary choreographers and stage directors. The stage also became her place to seek artistic identity, which she affirmed in her first solos: the multimedia work Cellule(2017), and the butoh-inspired piece* Beloved Shadows* (2019), created on her return from Japan, where she was a Villa Kujoyama resident.
Nach continues to embrace diverse formats that combine dance with, for example, autobiographical narratives, film, and performance art. Her piece Un endroit partout(2023) further refined the connection between body, storytelling, and video, while also revisiting and revising the artistic investigations informing her first group piece* Elles disent* (2022), in which she opened a space of choreographic freedom for three other female dancers, whose intimate stories emerged while accompanied by an empathic and powerful choir. Nach’s course in Critical Dance Studies at Freie Universität Berlin fosters a space for the study of methods and systems revolving around these central questions: Can protest dance find liberating and political power in the writing of movements, through the scoring of postures and narratives? What is the relationship to historical and intimate archives? How can we break free from ancestral attitudes and contracts by writing new scores? And what, indeed, constitutes a score in the first place?
About the Valeska Gert Visiting Professorship
The professorship is named after one of the most innovative dancers of the historical avant-garde, Valeska Gert (1892–1978), whose work was characteristic of the city of Berlin. She is representative of dancers and choreographers who are yet to be discovered and whose history is still to be written. Every semester, a dance or performance artist is invited by the Akademie der Künste, Freie Universität Berlin, and the Artists-in-Berlin Program of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) to work with students in the dance studies master’s program, applying a practically oriented approach. The content of the seminar is introduced at the beginning in a lecture; the outcomes are shown to the audience in a presentation at the end of the semester.