Since 2017, the dance artist Nach and her Nach Van Van 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 Valeska Gert Visiting Professor, Nach works alongside students to engage in practice-based research of the power of the margins, their narratives, and their essential and assertive and dissenting creativity. Nach's course at Critical Dance Studies fosters a space for passionate 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 if so, what constitutes a score in the first place?

Toward that end, Nach and the students work to tap into the fundamentals of Krump – circularity, eloquence, elevation and grounding – while exploring how, in Nach’s practice, these are brought into a moving embrace with flamenco, butoh, and classical dance forms, as well as into rich engagement with the ideas and works of researchers and artists from the worlds of (for example) music, the visual arts and puppetry. Wandering and travel are potent nourishers of new imaginative realms and corporealities, and the course Nach teaches as Valeska Gert Visiting Professor is thus an opportunity to dig into the topics of transformation/transcription, decolonization, and the reinvention of systems, bodies and languages, through movement research. 

About Nach

A dance artist with a background in Krump, Nach investigates her identity as a dancer and a woman, steering clear of restrictive categories. With her inquisitive and restless mind, she sets out in search of a porous organic body, informed by her wanderings (Japan, USA, Colombia) and aesthetic encounters (butoh, classical, heel dance).

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 festive interactions. In 2008, in Lyon, she first was first exposed to Krump, which propelled her intensely into dance. She soon became a professional dance artist, working as a performer for contemporary choreographers and stage directors. The stage also became the place to seek her artistic identity, which she affirmed in her first solos: Cellule (2017), a delicate urban peeling-away against a video backdrop; and Beloved Shadows (2019), created on her return from Japan (where she was a Villa Kujoyama resident), imbued with a butoh-esque slowness and a quirkily erotic quality.

Nach then added the spoken word to the eloquently expressive body at the center of her artistic practice. In her first danced lecture Nulle part est un ailleurs (2020), she found a voice that poured forth from her body, and which has been at play in her works ever since. Blending archive stills and footage, improvisation and self-narration, she retraced the story of her encounter with Krump as well as her gradual artistic emancipation. A few years later, Un endroit partout (2023) further refined the connection between body, storytelling and video, and updated her artistic investigations around her first group piece, Elles disent (2022), in which she fostered a space of choreographic freedom for three other female dancers, whose intimate stories emerged while accompanied by an empathic and powerful choir.

Nach also boldly embraces other formats, including the visual and performative installation Scène pour un récit nu (2023) – devised as a nod to the peep shows of yesteryear – and a long-term project on notating movement, Partition pour une être inconnue, which came to her suddenly during a residency in California (at the invitation of Villa Albertine in 2024) and continued during a fresh stay in Japan (2025), where she deep-dove into the archives of Hijikata Tatsumi and received the transmission of one of his solos. The project has yielded performative, filmic and written forms, such as a first performance with two musicians from the Ensemble Intercontemporain of the Philharmonie de Paris (Partition de l’être inconnue n°1, 2025).

Her next creation (2027), a duet with Mulunesh (who already featured in Elles dissent) extends her exploration of how voice and dance can heal damaged bodies.

In parallel to her choreographic work, Nach is training in fascia therapy and continuing to tour as a performer for Gisèle Vienne and Pauline Bayle. In autumn 2025, she travelled to Brazil as part of the France-Brazil Cultural Season.