Lucie Pestiaux

Date of birth: 20.05.1998
Nationality: Belgian
Languages: French, English, Spanish, Italian, Flemish

Lucie’s first steps into the world of performing arts came at a young age when she studied expressive arts, as part of her general curriculum. Performing arts was at first a way to express herself and develop a sensitivity to her inner world and her surroundings. Amazed by relationships in the living world, she started studying Ecological and Environmental sciences with Management at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland). Through her thesis, she dug deeper into the phenomenon of symbiosis, explored lichens and, created the Lichen Walk in Brussels and Edinburgh in order to move in the city through the ‘eyes’ of a different being.

The ecology of humans and their relations was of interest to her. Interested by the ‘living together’, she lived in a cooperative, developing skills in facilitation, democratic ways of living, and governance systems. After her study and through her work as a project coordinator and a facilitator for an NGO supporting territorial environmental transition in Belgium, she witnessed the importance of narratives and sensitivities to our surrounding environment in order to bring about fundamental changes in our actions. She realised that she lacked ways to cultivate and express sensitivities that are needed in order to perceive the world in acute ways and in all its complexity. Movement practices came naturally for her as a way to communicate and strive bodily and politically for the wonder of the living world.

At the Accademia Dimitri, she now explored body practices that allow to connect to other imaginaries and body consciousness and that have, in her opinion, the power to awaken to new narratives and thus transform the relationships to what surrounds us.

Throughout her life, she has trained in dance, acrobatics, physical theater, theater of the oppressed and clowning. Through the expression of movement and play, she ultimately wants to be part of collective and political struggles for socio-environmental justice.