Isabelle Beirens

I was born on March 25, 1973, under the sign of Aries, a sign that, according to my mother, gave me this irrepressible urge to move. An urge? Being alive! And life is movement. And movement is rhythm. Even when we are still, we move: cardiac, respiratory, circulatory movements. And our body tells its own story and creates its own rhythm. After my training at the Ecole de Cirque de Bruxelles, where I later taught for fifteen years, I was very quickly led to work in the theatre field, providing specific physical training for actors. Gradually, I developed a more precise language, a possible path that could lead them to access their “body language.” Alongside this, I followed training with Arnould Massart within the framework of the CEPC, as I try to introduce notions of rhythm to students in the Theatre department, and bodily work to those in the Bachelor in Rhythms and Rhythmics, yoga and juggling. For some time now, I have also been inviting music students from the Jazz department to take part in my classes, and together we try to find shared improvisation frameworks to inspire both musical and physical performance. Music students and actors improvise together, some through movement, others through music. All languages are connected. One might say that the accents simply fall in different places, which gives them different forms. I started at a young age by practicing apparatus gymnastics, then I began practicing martial arts, aikido and viet vo dao, before turning to dance, modern and contemporary. I chose partner acrobatics as my preferred technique at the Ecole de Cirque, and I worked as part of a duo with a partner for several years. I continued my training in modern and contemporary dance, Studio Jette, PARTS summer workshops, Axis Syllabus with Frey Faust and Baris Mici. I completed a four year training program to teach yoga, Desikachar tradition, followed by a three year post training program to continue the study of text. I studied music at an academy and have a strong interest in the cultural history of the body. I have been teaching at the Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles since 2014 and at ARTS2 since 2020, in the Theatre field. The techniques explored in these courses are not an end in themselves, but rather a path that offers the possibility to express oneself through movement, to become aware of the score that the body writes at every moment, in every situation.