In 2023, choreographer Ola Maciejewska presented Loïe Fuller: Research and Bombyx Mori, two re-readings of the iconic 'serpentine dances' of the 1890s. In 2024, she returns to the French May to create a collective work with students from The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. Drawing on her body of work, Maciejewska will lead participants to explore the tension between dance and sculpture. Together they will design a performance installation to be publicly presented at the end of Maciejewska's residency. 

In May 2024, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels and the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts are organising a two–week workshop for Master of Fine Arts students led by choreographer Ola Maciejewska. The workshop will culminate in an open studio presentation in collaboration with French May.

Conception & Choreographer: Ola Maciejewska

Assistant: Maëva Berthelot

Ola Maciejewska

Ola Maciejewska is an artist, dancer and choreographer. Her works are distinguished for their strong interdisciplinary take on dance, based on research and controlled structural work. Through working on convergences between dance and visual art she produced critical reading of the history of dance. Since 2013, she developed a unique choreographic practice based on re-reading iconic Serpentine Dances invented by Loïe Fuller in the 1890s. Her stage works Loïe Fuller: Research, and Bombyx Mori engage the viewer in reflection on metamorphosis, synesthesia, and the hybrid nature of embodiment.  

Between 2016 and 2018, she was an associated artist at the Centre Chorégraphique National de Caen in Normandie. In 2020, she led research on the scenography of Rolf Borzik in the Pina Bausch Foundation's archives.  

In 2022, she received a fellowship from the Watermill Center, founded by Robert Wilson. She develops frameworks to share her research, notably at HEAD School of Art and Design - Geneva, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts - Limoges, and Centre National de la Danse, And also premiered Figury (Przestrzenne), a solo performance, a multifaceted work articulated around time, endurance, and the sculptural. 

In 2023, she created a performance ON TIME with and for the students of atelier Emmanuelle Huynh at Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris.

In 2024, she premiered The second body, a duet performance between a performer and an ice object, an allegory of a fragile relationship between the human and the elements. 

She is currently working on a larger body of work involving serpentine dances, focused on convergences between dance and visual art and transmission with the support of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels.

Maëva Berthelot 

Maëva Berthelot is a choreographer, performer, movement director and teacher whose mode of working unfolds along the threshold between experimental, performative and collaborative approaches.   

She is the founder of WATERS, an artistic platform that thrives on building a community through the arts – Music, Performance and Visual Arts - and produces works spanning across theatres pieces, performances, installations, video works and events. 

Born in Paris, of Guadeloupean and Greek origin, she obtained her MA in contemporary dance from the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris in 2003. However, it is abroad that she pursued her artistic career for 20 years.

As a performer, she has collaborated with artists and companies such as Ohad Naharin, Roberta Jean, Emanuel Gat, Sharon Eyal, Damien Jalet and spent six years as a senior member with Hofesh Shechter Company, contributing creatively as an original cast member in numerous pieces and as a teacher.

Drawing from improvisational and somatic practices, her research ongoingly investigates themes of consciousness, transformation, healing, death and rebirth and finds its roots in a movement practice which explores the multiple layers of the body as well as the invisible systems and structures to which it belongs and with which it interacts. 

She conceives the body as a receptacle of the echoes of individual and collective memory and sees the choreographic space as an opportunity to create places of resistance, empathy and emotional exchange.