Biography
Charles-Alexis Desgagnés is a self-taught queer performer and choreographer based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, with more than 600 performances as a dancer and actor across some thirty diverse projects. He has created 15 choreographic works for the stage, solo and group performance, film, and immersive environments, including L’appel des braises, a 50-minute solo. The work was presented at Agora de la danse and selected for the official program of Parcours Danse in 2023. It was also selected for official competition at the prestigious Masdanza festival in Spain in 2025, following a Canadian tour in Québec City, Ottawa, and Toronto in 2023–2024. A finalist in the first season of Révolution in 2018, Charles-Alexis made a lasting impression as a pioneer of contemporary dance on the show and helped make the discipline more accessible to a wider audience.
His most recent short film, A Dying Tree, co-created with Oscar-nominated director Vincent René-Lortie, earned him a nomination for Best Performance in a Live Action Short at the 2026 Canadian Screen Awards, following a festival run that included 39 international selections and 11 awards, including the La Vague Award for Best Canadian Short Film at the Festival international du cinéma francophone en Acadie (FICFA). He was cast as a full-time performer in the large-scale immersive dance-theatre production Life and Trust in New York, from the same producers as Sleep No More by the renowned British company Punchdrunk, and obtained a U.S. O-1 artist visa for this work from 2023 to 2025. In June 2025, he performed and collaborated on the choreography of Mirror Maze, a finalist work by choreographer Laura Perron (Willow Seeds) at RIDCC in Rotterdam, the world’s largest contemporary dance duet competition.
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He founded and independently directed the organization Personne Danse from 2022 to 2026 and served as Assistant Artistic Director at José Navas/Compagnie Flak in 2025–2026. In 2026, he chose to return to working as an independent artist and dissolved the non-profit organization he had founded in order to better align with his body as a performer, his creative aspirations, and, above all, his desire to be a dance artist rather than a cultural administrator. He has been teaching intuitive contemporary dance for 15 years to adults of all levels as well as professional dancers. A passionate advocate of improvisation and dance as a tool for healing, he regularly takes part in ecstatic dance events throughout Montréal.
He trained as a yoga teacher at Yoga Sangha with Sylvie Tremblay in 2018 and as a creative leadership coach with Anne-Marie Duchêne at Alchemena in 2021. Since 2023, he has incorporated work with ayahuasca medicine and Shipibo traditions from the Amazon into his artistic practice, notably at the Soltara center in Costa Rica, where he serves as an assistant facilitator. Since 2021, Charles-Alexis has received eight grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ) and the Canada Council for the Arts (CCA). He has also served on six peer juries for the CALQ, the City of Montréal, and the City of Ottawa since 2020. His artistic practice is rooted in the heart of Montréal’s Mile End, at his artist loft, Chez Gaston.
Photo credits: Marie-Ève Dion, Cristina Planas, Melika Dez, Marc-Antoine Hallé, Damian Siqueiros, Cristina Planas, Cristina Planas, Marie-Ève Dion, Damian Siqueiros, Vanessa Fortin, Cristina Planas, Cristina Planas, Marie-Ève Dion, Damian Siqueiros et Marie-Ève Dion.
Artistic Approach
I am a dance artist who dances.
I am the anthropologist of my body.
I am intensity and softness, often simultaneously.
I am moved, from within and from without.
I am a queer artist who celebrates strangeness.
I dance to reconnect with the sacred.
The body in motion is at the heart of my artistic practice. Whether the work is more dance-based or more performative, the body always remains the focal point. Improvisation and choreographic writing are central to my relationship with movement. I move between film, site-specific work, immersive dance theatre, and work for the stage. My choreographic world is intimately connected to metamorphosis, shedding, the uncanny, our relationship with the invisible, gentle solitude (aloneness), and vulnerability. I strive, as much as I can, for integrity in gesture, body, choreographic writing, and performance. I am particularly drawn to solo work; to me, this form has the potential to be profoundly divine and ego-less when created from a selfless place. I approach duet work through a deconstruction of heteronormativity, where weight-sharing, explosiveness, and tenderness take precedence over gender roles in partnering. My approach to group work combines deconstructed unison, architectural imagery, partnering, and an unapologetic sense of athleticism.
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I am also deeply interested in the body’s ability to become a channel for automatic movement, as well as in the rigorous work behind finely crafted and precisely orchestrated choreographic writing. Having formally left the Catholic Church at the age of 18, I rediscovered a spiritual practice through movement at 21. Whether virtuosic or somatic, neither dancing state holds precedence for me, nor do I associate judgment with either. I am a queer artist whose interests lie more in exploring queer shame and queer joy than in the hypersexuality often foregrounded in queer work. My queerness is expressed primarily through the celebration of divine animality, which, for me, represents this deeper identity: the three lower energy centres associated with animality meeting the three upper centres associated with divinity at the heart.
As a self-taught contemporary dancer without formal academic training, I have developed over the years a movement language that combines several facets: extreme commitment (the solar side), extreme surrender (the lunar side), internal musicality, impact, non-musicality, the monster as a catalyst for vulnerability, the body as an architectural object, insect-like floorwork, and the sacred as a constant driving force in my approach to movement. Since 2023, my dance practice has been profoundly shaped by my experiences with ayahuasca. I have worked with this medicine directly in the Amazon with Shipibo maestros from Peru on 20 occasions. These inner journeys have completely transformed my relationship with dance, which I now see not only as an aesthetic, political, or intellectual object, but also as a vehicle for energetic and vibrational elevation.
Collaborators
I work and collaborate in a circular, non-hierarchical way with inspiring artists, each bringing a unique perspective to the creative process. I care deeply about highlighting the work of the designers and collaborators who surround my practice; they are at the heart of every stage in the creation of a new work.
Claire Seyller
A graduate of the University of Strasbourg with a degree in Performing Arts – Theatre (2015), as well as the Creation and Production program (2018) at the National Theatre School of Canada, Claire Seyller is an artist whose primary medium is light. Since arriving in Québec, she has assisted various lighting designers in theatre, dance, and music, including Alexandre Pilon-Guay (Virginie Brunelle, Estelle Clareton), Renaud Pettigrew (Bellflower, Fanny Bloom), and Cédric Delorme-Bouchard (Les BJM, Le Théâtre des Deux Mondes). She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in artistic practices at UQAM, where she is exploring the concept of circular collaboration.
Inspired and trained through collective creation within the European visual and performing arts, Claire has developed a strong interest in multidisciplinary processes. While building her expertise in lighting and becoming part of Québec’s emerging arts scene, she has become particularly interested in artistic collaborative dynamics as part of her academic research. Moving between theatre, dance, and performance, she is a regular collaborator with artists and companies such as Charles-Alexis Desgagnés (Personne Danse), Satellite Théâtre, Théâtre Kata, Grand Poney, and Mayday.
Alexis Leroy-Pleshoyano
Montreal-based Alexis Leroy-Pleshoyano — better known as Mada Mada — works as a composer and producer for film music, while also lending his talents as a producer and arranger for other artists, including Sandrine St-Laurent and J.A.M. Despite being only in his early twenties, Alexis Leroy-Pleshoyano won the Best Composer Award at the 2020 Montreal Independent Film Festival.
Mada Mada, his solo project, allows him to explore alternative electronic and pop soundscapes that contrast with the orchestral and neo-classical style of his professional work. A graduate of Berklee College of Music in composition, he met Charles-Alexis Desgagnés on the set of the music video for his first single, *Autonome*. An immediate personal and artistic connection developed, and the two Alexises have collaborated on various projects ever since. He notably composed the soundtrack for *Octopoda* (a piece for nine male dancers presented as part of the ESBQ show in 2022) and *J’ai pleuré ce matin dans le métro*. He also created the music and sound design for L’appel des braises, a 55-minute solo performed and choreographed by Charles-Alexis and presented in 2023–2024.
Vincent René-Lortie
Vincent René-Lortie is a Montreal-based director whose body of work includes several experimental short films and music videos. In recent years, he has notably received two nominations at the UK Music Video Awards as well as a nomination at the prestigious JUNO Awards. With a particular interest in dreamlike and surreal storytelling, his work moves across animation, science fiction, and dance film.
More recently, Vincent has focused on developing two fiction projects, including the award-winning short film Invincible, currently in distribution, and La Peau de l’autre, which entered post-production in 2023. The latter is an intimate collaboration with Charles-Alexis Desgagnés, choreographer, performer, and artistic director of Personne Danse.
Sophie Michaud
Sophie Michaud began her career in dance in the early 1980s. After completing a bachelor’s degree in dance and exploring movement through performance and choreography, she chose to deepen her understanding of contemporary dance creation by working as a rehearsal director. Through graduate studies — including a master’s degree in dance and doctoral coursework in Arts Studies and Practices at UQAM — as well as extensive professional practice, she has specialized in supporting choreographic creation processes.
As a rehearsal director and artistic and dramaturgical advisor, she has collaborated with numerous choreographers from a wide range of generations and artistic backgrounds. Her career has been marked by long-term collaborations with companies including Bouge de là, Cas Public, Corpuscule Danse, Catherine Gaudet Danse, Lucie Grégoire Danse, Lorganisme (Amélie Rajotte, Caroline Laurin-Beaucage), Sinha Danse, Manon fait de la danse, Fleuve Espace Danse, and Human PlayGround. In recent years, she has also developed fruitful collaborations with Other Animals (Alexandre Morin/Jonathan Goulet), La sporée (Sarah Bronsard), Les Sœurs Schmutt, Le Radeau (Ariane Boulet), the Vâtchik Danse collective, and lighting designer Hugo Dalphond.
As both a researcher and practitioner, she has developed an ongoing reflection on communication methods and ethics, which she brings into each of the contexts in which she works. She places particular importance on the relationship between artistic and interpersonal considerations and on how these dynamics manifest themselves in the studio. To date, she has contributed to more than two hundred choreographic creation projects for the stage, film, site-specific work, and multidisciplinary productions.
Beyond the studio, Sophie Michaud is also known for her longstanding commitment, since the early 1990s, to promoting and recognizing the profession of rehearsal director in dance. She conceived and serves as artistic director of an archival research project that will lead to the creation of a virtual exhibition aimed at bringing greater visibility to experienced Québec artists working as assistants and advisors. Drawing on her extensive experience with creative processes, she also works as a consultant, writer, educator, and arts mediator. Her career further includes significant involvement on committees and boards of directors for organizations dedicated to dance in Québec.
L’appel des braises is her first collaboration with Personne Danse as rehearsal director and dramaturgical advisor.
