Monologues is presented through a series of performances spread out through time and space. Each of them takes its shape in distinct venues and time. This trimester, Monologues #5, #6 and #7 will be presented at Arsenic.

Backwards to the concept of monologue, usually evoking a solo and egocentrical discourse, the choreographer Nicole Seiler explores here the monologue as a collective shape. The monologues are in dialogue, listening and answering, all the way to creating a polyphony of self-poetry.

What does it mean to have a voice? What does a voice say when its wordless? What does a body say when its voiceless?

The Monologues offers a space to nourish and cherish multi-faceted and moving identities. They reveal both idiosyncrasies and transversalities, through the ways in which each performer expresses themselves and begins to exist here and now. Hoping along the way to be heard and seen.

Alina Arshi is a dancer and choreographer based in Lausanne. Having traversed ever-changing languages and cultural contexts, her questions today revolve around what emerges in common. She is inspired by the contradictory status of the body: at once concrete and abstract, this tool opens up other dimensions of communication and understanding.Entepfuhl, her Bachelor’s thesis at La Manufacture, has been presented in various venues in Switzerland, France, Italy and the UK. As a dancer, Alina has worked with Teresa Vittucci, Nicole Seiler, Marlène Saldana and Jonathan Drillet, Léa Katharina Meier, Juliette Uzor, Emma Bertuchoz, Mathilde Monnier, and Simon Van Schuylenbergh.

Nicole Seiler created her company in 2002 and has since made over 30 projects. She is now a key figure of the Swiss contemporary dance scene.

Her work creates innovative and singular projects with a great variety of format: on-stage choreographies, videos, movies, performances, and choreographic installation, often in situ, keeping the audience active. During the last few years, her research on image and sound focused mainly on the depiction of movement, the exploration of a dance language in relation to its physical counterpart, and the memory of movement from a historical or personal point of view.
It brought her to develop an interest to voice work, through the use of the body as an instrument.
Nicole Seiler has won several awards, among which the Swiss Arts Award in 2021.