Embedded Files
Works Available for Touring
Works Available for Touring
The love of the world
The love of the world
Épaissisme Dance
Community engagement
Community engagement
Beyond the Stage: Extending the Épaissisme Experience
ZemmourBallet’s works do not end with the performance.
They open thresholds that can be extended into other spaces of encounter, transmission, and reflection.
Within this framework, Nicolas Zemmour offers masterclasses, creative workshops, and structured talks centered on Épaissisme and the presented works. These are not outreach activities in an illustrative sense, but extensions of the lived experience: they engage the body, time, and gesture as sites of memory, responsibility, and presence.
Designed for students, professional artists, and non-specialist audiences alike, these formats prolong the co-presence between the work and those who encounter it. They create a space where the stage experience can be revisited, displaced, and re-inscribed into individual lived experience—without simplification or prescriptive discourse.
About the Work
About the Work
Running time: 60 minutes — Six performers
Running time: 60 minutes — Six performers
Touring party of 8 people (6 performers, 1 technical director, 1 dramaturg)
Touring party of 8 people (6 performers, 1 technical director, 1 dramaturg)
A sage asks a student:
— What is the greatest love?
— Love for another?
The sage smiles:
— No. It is the love of the question. As long as you keep questioning, you are alive.
From this riddle emerges L’amour du monde. It is not a work about love as an answer or an ideal, but about the force that keeps us open to others, to the unknown and to the world.
Onstage, six performers are swept into a continuous flow of movement. Bodies meet, support one another, become entangled, push apart and find each other again. No gesture carries a single meaning: tenderness can become a burden, connection can become constraint, and a fall can open the way to a new balance. Every movement holds the possibility of its opposite.
Within the grammar of Épaissisme, no body exists in isolation. Each presence acts upon the others, shifts the group and leaves a trace. The stage becomes an interwoven field of relationships in which loving also means accepting that we may be transformed.
L’amour du monde moves through the contradictions of a fragmented world: How can we remain open without losing ourselves? How can we preserve our freedom while belonging to others? How can we continue to love what escapes us, resists us or wounds us?
The performers offer no answers. They question through their flesh, breath, weight and falls. Within this physical intensity, moments of poetry emerge—instants in which connection still seems possible.
The audience does not witness a demonstration about love; they enter a living question. A question that moves between bodies and reminds us that, as long as it remains open, the world can still be loved—and life can still be danced.
Team
Team
Nicolas Zemmour: Artistic Director, Choreographer
Music composed and performed by YOM
Julien St-Pierre: Lighting Designer
Marc Zemmour: Dramaturg
Catherine Wilson: Performer
Aria Trotel: Performer
Claire Campbell: Performer
Anja Fanslau: Performer
Gabriela Guerra Woo: Performer
Nicolas Zemmour: Performer
The Escapees from Moraline
The Escapees from Moraline
Épaissisme Dance
Community engagement
Community engagement
Beyond the Stage: Extending the Épaissisme Experience
ZemmourBallet’s works do not end with the performance.
They open thresholds that can be extended into other spaces of encounter, transmission, and reflection.
Within this framework, Nicolas Zemmour offers masterclasses, creative workshops, and structured talks centered on Épaissisme and the presented works. These are not outreach activities in an illustrative sense, but extensions of the lived experience: they engage the body, time, and gesture as sites of memory, responsibility, and presence.
Designed for students, professional artists, and non-specialist audiences alike, these formats prolong the co-presence between the work and those who encounter it. They create a space where the stage experience can be revisited, displaced, and re-inscribed into individual lived experience—without simplification or prescriptive discourse.
About the work
About the work
The ZemmourBallet’s 2024 creation is a surge of movement, a performance where dance sweats, bursts, and fills the space. Over 1 hour and 5 minutes, six performers launch themselves with raw energy and total stage presence, exploring the tension between freedom and dependence, morality and ethics.
In this shifting space, morality and ethics confront and balance each other, like two forces of the same vital drive. Nietzsche, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, called for transcending inherited morality—one that restrains through dogma and prohibition—to embrace a living ethics shaped by personal will and self-affirmation. Here, dance becomes a metaphor for this tension: between imposed constraints and earned freedom, falls and ascents, discipline and spontaneity. Each movement seeks that fragile balance, that precision where the body, far from being submissive, becomes the expression of an inner force in constant reinvention.
This performance blends athletic power, visual poetry, and pure emotion, creating a show that is as striking as it is liberating. Each jump, each impulse pushes the limits of body and stage, transforming the space into a whirlwind of sensations and questions.
Between strength and delicacy, this work is not merely watched—it is experienced. Energy pulses, breath quickens, and the audience is swept up, carried by a dance that touches both heart and soul, leaving an indelible mark long after the final movement.
An incandescent performance where the body becomes language and the space becomes vertigo.
Dare the experience. Come and experience dance in a new way.
Team
Team
Nicolas Zemmour: Artistic Director, Choreographer
Marc Zemmour: Dramaturg
Simon Leoza: Composer, in collaboration with the Orchestre symphonique de Sherbrooke
Julien St-Pierre: Lighting Designer
Art Babayants: Artistic advisor
Claire Campbell: Performer
Anja Fanslau: Performer
Aria Trotel: Performer
Laura Brisson: Performer
Catherine Wilson: Performer
Nicolas Zemmour: Performer
With the participation of a local dance student
The Hell of a World
The Hell of a World
Épaissisme Dance
Community engagement
Community engagement
Beyond the Stage: Extending the Épaissisme Experience
ZemmourBallet’s works do not end with the performance.
They open thresholds that can be extended into other spaces of encounter, transmission, and reflection.
Within this framework, Nicolas Zemmour offers masterclasses, creative workshops, and structured talks centered on Épaissisme and the presented works. These are not outreach activities in an illustrative sense, but extensions of the lived experience: they engage the body, time, and gesture as sites of memory, responsibility, and presence.
Designed for students, professional artists, and non-specialist audiences alike, these formats prolong the co-presence between the work and those who encounter it. They create a space where the stage experience can be revisited, displaced, and re-inscribed into individual lived experience—without simplification or prescriptive discourse.
About the work
About the work
Team
Team
Nicolas Zemmour: Artistic Director, Choreographer
Marc Zemmour: Dramaturg
Simon Leoza: Composer
Julien St-Pierre: Lighting Designer
Art Babayants: Artistic advisor
Claire Campbell: Performer
Anja Fanslau: Performer
Aria Trotel: Performer
Laura Brisson: Performer
Catherine Wilson: Performer
Nicolas Zemmour: Performer
Hell of a World is an explosion of movement, an intense performance where dance becomes a cry—a raw force that pierces both body and soul. Driven by a gripping, visceral choreography, this work transforms the stage into a whirlwind of pure energy, where every gesture strikes like a detonation.
We explored violence in all its forms, from inner turmoil to the outbursts of the external world. Each movement carries this tension between the intimate and the exposed, between silent wounds and visible eruptions. Here, dance does not merely illustrate violence; it questions its deepest mechanisms: How does it carve itself into the body? How does it reverberate through social space? Every gesture bears witness to this duality—between endured impact and resisting energy, between crushing and affirmation. The body, alternately a refuge and a battlefield, becomes the site of a metamorphosis where brutality turns into language, where pain becomes dance.
Through powerful and committed movement, Hell of a World plunges the audience into the heart of the fight against domestic violence, without ever falling into didacticism. Here, emotion flows through the body; rage and resilience incarnate in movements of rare intensity. Far from being a mere observation, this performance is a vibrant call to action and awareness—an experience that is felt as much as it is lived.
A captivating and resolutely modern work that pushes the boundaries of contemporary dance. A stunning stage experience not to be missed.
ZemmourBallet is a contemporary dance company founded and directed by choreographer Nicolas Zemmour. It is the primary stage-based expression of Épaissisme, an artistic and philosophical movement that places the depth of human experience — corporeal, temporal, and relational — at the core of choreography.
Rooted in an international career of high-level practice (Ballet Preljocaj, Bolshoi Ballet), Nicolas Zemmour’s work is driven by a search for density, responsibility, and presence. Each creation is conceived as a threshold: a space of active co-presence between artist and audience, where movement carries memory, tension, and transformation.
Based in Sherbrooke, Québec, the company develops a physical, precise, and embodied dance language, designed for national and international touring. Within ZemmourBallet, Épaissisme is neither a style nor a visual signature, but an operative framework that structures the relationship to time, body, space, and spectatorship.
ZemmourBallet creates rigorous, shareable works that engage diverse audiences without resorting to simplification or entertainment. Each piece belongs to a clear artistic continuum, intended for institutions that view art as a space of responsibility, freedom, and engagement.
Repertoire Works
Repertoire Works
Lemniscate
Lemniscate
Épaissisme Dance
Community engagement
Community engagement
Beyond the Stage: Extending the Épaissisme Experience
ZemmourBallet’s works do not end with the performance.
They open thresholds that can be extended into other spaces of encounter, transmission, and reflection.
Within this framework, Nicolas Zemmour offers masterclasses, creative workshops, and structured talks centered on Épaissisme and the presented works. These are not outreach activities in an illustrative sense, but extensions of the lived experience: they engage the body, time, and gesture as sites of memory, responsibility, and presence.
Designed for students, professional artists, and non-specialist audiences alike, these formats prolong the co-presence between the work and those who encounter it. They create a space where the stage experience can be revisited, displaced, and re-inscribed into individual lived experience—without simplification or prescriptive discourse.
About the work
About the work
Team
Team
Nicolas Zemmour: Artistic Director, Choreographer
Marc Zemmour: Dramaturge
Andréanne Deschênes: Lighting Designer
Amandine Garrido: Performer
Elise Legrand: Performer
Nicolas Zemmour: Performer
With Lemniscate, ZemmourBallet invites you on a hypnotic and vibrant exploration of the Tarot, where dance becomes a universal language—a mirror of our rebirths and inner quests. Inspired by the Magician card, Nicolas Zemmour choreographs a world where love, solitude, joy, and responsibility intertwine in a poetic and magnetic movement vocabulary.
How can a finite being contain the infinite? This is the tension that Lemniscate explores: the body, limited by space and time, yet carrying within it the echo of something greater. Each gesture is an attempt to inscribe the ephemeral into the perpetual; each impulse reflects the aspiration to transcend material existence. In Tarot tradition, the infinity symbol hovers above the Magician—a sign of endless energy, of a cycle that constantly renews. Dance becomes the expression of this fragile balance between constraint and boundlessness, between the weight of the body and the elevation of the spirit.
Here, every movement traces an invisible energy, every gesture evokes the quest for meaning and freedom in a world in perpetual transformation. Through dance that transcends the visible, Lemniscate transports the audience into a whirlwind where humanity rediscovers its place, its breath, its essence.
An enchanting and immersive trio performance, where the stage becomes a ritual and dance, a revelation. Dare to experience it. Dive into the magic of movement.
The Shattering of Vases
The Shattering of Vases
Épaissisme Dance
Community engagement
Community engagement
Beyond the Stage: Extending the Épaissisme Experience
ZemmourBallet’s works do not end with the performance.
They open thresholds that can be extended into other spaces of encounter, transmission, and reflection.
Within this framework, Nicolas Zemmour offers masterclasses, creative workshops, and structured talks centered on Épaissisme and the presented works. These are not outreach activities in an illustrative sense, but extensions of the lived experience: they engage the body, time, and gesture as sites of memory, responsibility, and presence.
Designed for students, professional artists, and non-specialist audiences alike, these formats prolong the co-presence between the work and those who encounter it. They create a space where the stage experience can be revisited, displaced, and re-inscribed into individual lived experience—without simplification or prescriptive discourse.
About the work
About the work
Team
Team
CHOREOGRAPHY: Nicolas Zemmour
PERFORMERS: Emilie Garetier, Aurore Mettray, Francesco Mormino, Julien Ramade, Annick Schadeck, Nicolas Zemmour
SCENOGRAPHY: Thibaut Magnan
ORIGINAL MUSIC: Wilfrid Rapanakis-Bourg
ORIGINAL TEXT: Nicolas Zemmour
COSTUMES: Laurie Lamborelle
LIGHTING: Nina Schäffer
The Breaking of the Vessels marks Nicolas Zemmour’s first international creation, a work commissioned and produced by the Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg. This piece draws inspiration from the Kabbalistic legend of The Breaking of the Vessels - a foundational myth that speaks of the dispersion of divine light and humanity’s responsibility to gather these scattered fragments to restore original harmony.
In this cosmogonic tale, the vessels meant to contain primordial light shatter under the intensity of this infinite force, scattering shards into the darkness of the world. This fracture, far from being a definitive fall, becomes a call to repair - a quest for Tikkun, where every being carries a fragment of light to rediscover and reintegrate. Here, dance embodies this dispersion and reunification: each movement is an attempt to mend the broken pieces, to reclaim cohesion from chaos. Bodies, sometimes in tension, sometimes in fusion, become the terrain of a struggle between fragmentation and recomposition, between loss and rebirth. The stage space echoes this original fracture, oscillating between deconstruction and moments of pure harmony, where gesture reveals the vital need to reassemble the scattered, to restore meaning and unity to what was broken.
You will feel the fragility, strength, and beauty of the moving body, driven by raw energy that captivates and unsettles. The spectator is not merely an observer but an actor in a sensory experience where every instant, every contact resonates deeply. Between bursts of powerful movement and suspended moments, The Breaking of the Vessels offers an intense emotional journey, where human fragility transforms into collective strength. A performance where bodies speak, where emotions are lived through every breath, every interaction. More than a philosophical reflection, this is a true corporeal and sensory experience.
This work marks a milestone in Nicolas Zemmour’s artistic journey, where profound thought merges with unparalleled physical and emotional power. The Breaking of the Vessels is far more than a performance: it is a moment of pure intensity, a whirlwind of sensations that will leave no one untouched. Belonging to the Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, this piece remains a cornerstone of Zemmour’s choreographic path, testifying to his commitment to creating powerful works rooted in philosophical and spiritual depth.
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