Hello, I’m Clément Layes. I am a choreographer, dancer, and somatic researcher, born in France in 1978. I create and hold spaces for people to experience themselves through movement, objects and somatic practices—via performances, classes, workshops, mentoring, event, and residencies.
Over the past 20 years, I have created a body of performances that invite reflection on non-human agencies and articulate visions of worlds in which humans are not at the center.
Artistic Career
Clément Layes, born in France in 1978, studied art history and philosophy and received professional dance training at the Conservatoire National de Région (CNR) and the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Lyon (CNSMD).
From 2004 to 2010, he worked as a performer and researcher with, among others, Odile Duboc and Boris Charmatz. In 2008, he co-founded Public in Private with Jasna Vinovrski in Berlin. He had his breakthrough as a choreographer with the solo Allege (2010), which was presented at numerous venues and festivals across Europe, as well as in Canada and the USA. He received the Jury Prize at the Infant Festival (Novi Sad, Serbia) and was awarded the Prix Jardin d’Europe in 2011.Numerous productions followed, most of them co-produced with Sophiensaele Berlin and various European platforms. In 2018, Clément Layes was invited by the Venice Biennale to present a retrospective of his work.
Throughout his career, he has developed a working method that brings choreography, visual art, and conceptual thinking into dialogue through research on everyday objects. This method has been discussed in several publications, most recently in Martina Ruhsam’s Non-Human Bodies in Contemporary Dance, which received the Dance Science Prize NRW in 2021.
The following years were marked by significant aesthetic and personal shifts. In 2021, he created Ich bin Tscheud with Jasna L. Vinovrski, a work addressing their family’s process of obtaining German citizenship. In 2022, experiences of loss and the pandemic inspired The River I, a work performed daily on Berlin’s waterways during the summers of 2022 and 2023, and later adapted for the Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires (FIBA) in 2024.
Platforms and Institutions
Since 2014, Clément Layes has been critically engaged with theater as a site for artistic presentation, particularly in Berlin. Together with other artists, he co-founded the platform How do we work it, which questions conditions of art production and opens new spaces of possibility.
Following this initiative, he co-founded the 3AM event series at Flutgraben e.V., involving over 80 artists and more than 1,000 spectators between 2014 and 2017. Further initiatives followed, including Flutgraben Performances and the Flutgraben Residencies program (2019). Through this work, Public in Private Studio and Flutgraben e.V. have become significant alternative spaces for dance and performance in Berlin.
In 2017, he collaborated with Kunstencentrum BUDA (Kortrijk, Belgium) on an accompanying festival program and co-developed the concept of The Fantastic Institution. That same year, he became a co-organizer of The Watch, a group of artists dedicated to the artistic activation of a former border guard tower at Schlesisches Feld in Berlin.
www.flutgrabenperformances.org
Somatics
Since his early dance studies Clément has been captivated by somatic, he met inspiring figure with a non representational approach to dance like Steve Paxton, Hubert Godard and Claude Espinassier and did the professional Feldenkrais training under the supervision of Julia Casson Rubin and Paul Rubin ending in 2006. He has been inspired by Ericksonian approach and Somatic experiencing, as well he’s been a Vipassana practicioner since 2011 with numerous retreat, and since 2018 also a Chöd meditation practitioner. He trained in the school of Consent, by Betty Martin (2024), "Like a Pro" and the advanced level “Working with Groups” (2026). He also participated in the Seminar Polyvagal Theory and the Modern Family: Finding Safety and Connection, with the Polyvagal Institute (with numerous outstanding researcher like Gabor Maté, Stephen Porges…)
Teaching
Clément regularly teaches at art/ dance universities and leads workshops. The foundation of his teaching comes from over 20 years of research in performance-making, grounded in an embodied approach to questions of object agency, post-humanism, and phenomenology. His mixed background in dance and circus, informed by somatic practices together with a strong interest in philosophy, creates space for curiosity, pleasure, and playfulness. He see these 3 (curiosity, pleasure and playfulness) as essential pathways for students and staff to access their resources, develop creative strategies, and engage actively in the learning process. Thanks to his consent training and trauma aware education he creates spaces where to experience risk and failure in a supported manner and learn in a safer environement. Since 2014, he has worked as a guest lecturer and mentor at the HZT- University Center for Dance Berlin, and has taught at institutions including the University of Zagreb (Dance and Theatre) and the MA in Physical Performance Making in Tallinn…