Romaeuropa Festival and Short Theatre 2026 once again join forces to present the Italian premiere of L’echo, the latest creation by Franco-Algerian choreographer Nacera Belaza. The duo features the artist herself on stage alongside Valérie Dréville, a French actress known for her three-decade career in auteur cinema. An artistic encounter that feels almost inevitable. For some time now, the choreographer has been exploring the grey area in which the “point of junction” lies between speech and the language that sets the body in motion. In Valérie Dréville she has found a partner equally traversed by the power of imagination and by the force of an intense inner life.
With a coherence that has remained unchanged over the past thirty years, Nacera Belaza’s work traces a creative path whose singularity recalls the radical research of the 1970s avant-garde. On the occasion of this encounter, initiated by MC93, the choreographer and Valérie Dréville have embarked on a new work centred on the body as a receptacle of imagination.
At the heart of this exploration lies the expressive potential of dance, which Belaza has long described as “a word spoken through the body”, a vital force running through her artistic journey. A strong intuitive complicity quickly developed between the two, sustained by the inner density of this major figure of theatre and her extraordinary ability to embody language through the body. This has led to a process of deepening this resonance and bringing to the surface the subterranean echoes linking their two artistic universes.
