Walls and Bridges
Walls and Bridges is a 10-day series of performances and critical explorations uniting French and American thinkers and artists from social sciences, philosophy, literature and live arts.
Jeanne Mordoj
Jeanne Mordoj © Bertrand Gaudillère
ARTIST
France
Biography
Born in Paris in 1970, Mordoj spent her childhood in the country with sculptor-parents who had switched to raising goats. She has always had a very particular relationship with objects, one that involves strange attachments, rituals, a rock collection carefully sorted into labeled bags, small sculptures, and a strong tie with paint, lines, and words. And juggling items, such as hand sewn balls. She discovered the circus when she was 13, at the Saltimbanques school in Chenôve. It immediately became a passion, nurtured by four years of amateur practice there in acrobatics, contortionism, and juggling. At 17, she started school in Chalons en Champagne but was kicked out after a difficult year. So started her on-the-job training in various roles: bit parts in movies, opera, theater. And she met people who would be important in the long term, like Lan N’Guyen, a teacher then teaching at the Cirque Plume school, who taught her contortionism through games and creativity; Jérôme Thomas, who influenced her work and encouraged her in her projects. Then came formative internships, with Marc Michel Georges, Yoshi Oida, and Guy Alloucherie for theater; drawing practice; BMC (Body Mind Centering) with Lula Chourlin and Janet Amato; and more recently the Transmettre (Pass On) training with Bénédicte Pavelak.
