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.
Nacera Belaza was born near Médéa in Algeria and has lived in France since the age of five. After studying modern literature, she set up her own company in 1989.
She became a self-taught dancer, driven by the vital need to express herself, to express and unravel the complexity of her dual cultural background. It was during childhood and adolescence, in secret, that her language emerged spontaneously, drawing material first from herself and then from literature. Since then, her work has explored movement in a serene, deep and continuous breath, confronting patience, discipline and simplicity with the ‘deafening din of our lives’, giving gesture its existential utility. In 2015, she was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and in 2024 an Officier. In 2008, Le
Cri received the Prix de la révélation from the Syndicat de la Critique. In 2017, the SACD also paid tribute to her career by awarding her the Choreographer Prize. Her work is regularly performed in Europe, Africa,
Asia and North America. She has set up a cooperative in Algeria that enables her to work regularly with the country of her origins.
Valérie Dréville trained at the Théâtre national de Chaillot (with Antoine Vitez, Yannis Kokkos, Aurélien Recoing and Georges Aperghis) and at the Conservatoire national supérieur d’art dramatique de Paris (with Viviane Théophilides, Claude Régy, Gérard Desarthe and Daniel Mesguich).
Her theatre career was marked by her meeting with Antoine Vitez, her teacher at Chaillot, who directed her in Électre, Le Soulier de satin, La Célestine and La Vie de Galilée. She joined the Comédie Française in 1988, leaving in 1993. She played in Racine’s Iphigénie under the
direction of Yannis Kokkos. She also acted under the direction of Claude Régy in Le Criminel by Leslie Kaplan, La Terrible Voix de Satan by Gregory Motton, Quelqu’un va venir by Jon Fosse.
Des couteaux dans les poules by David Harrower, Variations sur la mort by Jon Fosse, Comme un chant de David, traduction des psaumes by Henri Meschonnic, La Mort de Tintagiles by Maurice Maeterlinck.
Her film credits include major roles in La Sentinelle, directed by Arnaud Desplechin, and La Maladie de Sachs, directed by Michel Deville.
She also performed Racine’s Phèdre under the direction of Luc Bondy at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe.
In recent years she has travelled regularly to Russia to work with Anatoli Vassiliev and his company. Médée-Matériau by Heiner Müller premiered in Moscow in 2001, and has since toured the world (Paris, Avignon, Rennes, Spain, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, etc.).In 2018, she will be starring in Le Récit d’un homme inconnu, based on Chekhov’s novella, again directed
by Anatoli Vassiliev, with Sava Lolov, Stanislas Nordey and Romane Rassendren. She is associate artist at the Théâtre national de Strasbourg. She has just performed Les Possédés and Edelweiss under the direction of Sylvain Creuzevault, and Liberté à Brême under the direction of Cédric Gourmelon. She is preparing a show with Jérôme Bel.
