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Épaissisme is an artistic movement that engages the responsibility of the artist and the spectator in the face of the world’s complexity.
Épaissisme is an artistic movement that engages the responsibility of the artist and the spectator in the face of the world’s complexity.
It works toward the to-come, works through forgetting, and abandons each person to their freedom before thresholds to be crossed.
It works toward the to-come, works through forgetting, and abandons each person to their freedom before thresholds to be crossed.
Épaissisme is an artistic movement grounded in the conviction that human experience cannot be reduced, accelerated, or rendered transparent without loss.
It affirms the thickness of bodies, time, gestures, and language as essential conditions for dignity, thought, and creation.
Against the generalized flattening of the living, Épaissisme develops works that reopen thresholds of presence, memory, and responsibility.
Manifesto of Épaissisme_EN.pdfFounding Team
Founding Team
Nicolas Zemmour
Artistic Director, choreographer, and author, Nicolas Zemmour has led ZemmourBallet since 2019. His choreographic work combines formal rigor with philosophical depth, developing a corporeal writing engaged with contemporary questions surrounding human experience.
Trained with major figures of the international dance scene, he has performed with Ballet Preljocaj, appeared as a guest soloist with the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, and taught in various artistic institutions. His works, including L’enfer d’un monde (2022) and Les évadé·e·s de la moraline (2024), interrogate mechanisms of sensory impoverishment and open spaces of resistance through movement.
As a producer and festival director, and the author of a choreographic creation method, Nicolas Zemmour conceives dance as a site of transformation, embodied thought, and encounter between bodies, memory, and alterity. He is the co-founder of Épaissisme, which he develops as a living and operative artistic movement.
Marc Zemmour
Dramaturg, author, and academic, Marc Zemmour develops a transversal practice at the intersection of art, pedagogy, and philosophy. Holding a PhD in Education Sciences, with a specialization in evaluation and didactics, he has worked as a teacher, trainer, psycho-pedagogical advisor, and university lecturer.
His work combines conceptual rigor with close attention to lived experience. He accompanies artistic and educational projects by questioning conditions of transmission, meaning, and responsibility. As dramaturg of ZemmourBallet since its inception, he is also the co-founder of Épaissisme, contributing to its articulation as a thought of human thickness and relational experience.
Together
Marc and Nicolas Zemmour pursue a shared artistic and theoretical research grounded in dialogue between generations, disciplines, and practices.
Épaissisme emerges from this exchange as a space of creation and thought in which the artwork becomes a site of fertile tension between form, experience, and responsibility—restoring art as an engaged act for both artist and audience.
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