Olga de Soto is a Spanish choreographer, dancer and dance researcher based in Brussels. She graduated from the CNDC / Centre National de Danse Contemporaine d'Angers after studying classical ballet, contemporary dance and music theory in her native country. Olga began her choreographic work focused on research and composition in 1992, exploring different formats in numerous pieces, some designed in dialogue with works by contemporary music composers, within a long-term collaboration with IRCAM, in Paris.
Since the early 2000s, her work has focused on the themes of memory, trace and transmission, mixing the language of choreography with that of documentary, performance, visual art and installation, playing with the porosity of those disciplines. The work proceeds along two axes. The first axis concentrates on the study of the dancer's bodily memory through a pluralistic approach to dance and the body. The second axis explores works from dance history from the perspective of the perceptual memories of spectators and dancers, questioning the impact of live art, its utility, and its enduring quality. The resulting projects deal with archives, documentation, testimonies, oral sources, narratives and stories. They focus on the experience of the spectator and the anthropology of the spectacle, while developing through an approach that studies the artistic experience based on the oral history of the works.
Olga's work has been presented in some twenty countries. She is regularly invited to share and transfer her methodologies within the academic framework in universities in Europe, Latin America and the United States.
In 2013, de Soto was awarded the Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers - SACD Prize (Belgium), in the Performing Arts category, for her research and creative work on The Green Table by Kurt Jooss. Since 2019, she is a guest lecturer at the Master in Dance of the Antwerp Conservatory / Artesis Plantijn Hogeschool Antwerp.
Teaching-artist: Portfolio Artistic Practice, Master Projects