More Than Dance: Juliette Louste’s Autobiographical Flækt Blends Storytelling And Choreography

On an otherwise unremarkable Thursday night, the lights of the full-house Tjarnarbíó dim, and a silhouette appears behind a sheer curtain. Blink. Darkness. Light again — the figure now in a different corner. The sequence repeats until a voice breaks in: “I really like numbers.” Shapes — numbers, doodles, fragments — appear on the curtain as the performer steps into her role as narrator. This is Juliette Louste, telling her story.

The grind

Before we go back to her new dance piece Flækt, there are a few things you should know about Juliette.

Born in France, she left at 18 to study in Spain. After a few years there, struggling to make a living as an artist, she packed up again.

“I decided to just leave my job, my flat, and go on the road. For about four years, I was living wherever I was working — going from one festival to another, one choreographer to another, just contacting people and seeing if they needed help for the next project or whatever,” Juliette tells me as we meet on the afternoon of the premiere, admitting she stayed up late the night before. “Generally, it was all volunteer work. But I was treating it as a first trip to some places. That’s how I ended up in Iceland, actually.”

She first came to Iceland in 2013 for the Reykjavík Dance Festival, originally to help with production, but soon found herself running the technical side of the shows. A year later, it happened again: a last-minute call, another festival, another chance to prove herself. She delivered and was eventually invited to become the technical director of Tjarnarbíó — the first woman in Iceland to hold the position.

The title might sound glamorous, but the reality of working in the arts, even in Iceland, is often about sacrifice and barely making ends meet. For Juliette, it meant living in the theatre for almost two years (not just working long hours, literally living in one of the theatre’s office rooms), doing unpaid gigs, and, like many women in the industry, having to prove herself over and over again despite the equality utopia we sometimes think we live in. “On so many levels, it was a fight project. And I like these kinds of projects,” she says.

“Basically, every time I wanted to leave Iceland, I got offered a job.”

“It took me 10 years until, when I entered the room, people were like, ‘Oh, it’s Juliette, it’s going to be fine.’ For those 10 years, I got a bit of everything — questions like, ‘But who will take care of the tech equipment?’ ‘Yeah, that’s me.’ ‘But who’s writing the emails?’ ‘Yeah, that’s me as well.’ ‘But who will do the setup?’ ‘Yeah, I’ll do that.’ ‘But who will program?’ ‘Yeah, I can do that too.’ ‘But if we have a problem, who do we call?’” Juliette continues.

Since Juliette based herself in Iceland, more and more gigs kept coming her way — she joined Borgarleikhúsið as a technician and Þjóðleikhúsið as an assistant choreographer on a theatre piece. “Basically, every time I wanted to leave Iceland, I got offered a job,” says Juliette. “Then I was like, ‘Once this show is finished, it’s over,’ but I met my now-husband at that show.”

Opportunity knocks

Now, Juliette has temporarily returned to her old job as a technical director of Tjarnarbíó, covering a maternity leave until April, which she’s happy about. “I’m really happy it’s a short-term thing, because I’m extremely perfectionist, and I give myself 1,000 percent to everything I do, and this house takes a lot,” she says. Otherwise, she describes her work life as “extreme freelance.”

“If we go over the last year, I was in China for a month with one theatre group. We had a few shows there, then a few in Spain, where I was mostly dancing with jazz musicians, which is what I love,” Juliette lists. “Then six weeks in New York with the same producers who produced this show, but for a theatre show — they asked me to be the technical director and the assistant producer. After that, Madeira for the residency of the piece, then the Ivory Coast. They called me for a dance festival, but had absolutely no money, so I was like, ‘I don’t do that anymore, I have a family, they would have to come. It will cost me so much money.’ So I asked for an exchange — a rehearsal space because I was preparing a show.”

The idea to work on Flækt goes back to the producers Hans H. Gruenert and Virginial Wall Gruenert from Viva Holding, who approached her to create the show and financed it.

“They are a couple from Pittsburgh, in the US. They are business people, basically industrials, and they don’t believe in their political system. Their way of having more control over where their taxes go is to pay artists that make shows that they believe in, rather than paying Trump or Bush,” Juliette explains. “That’s what they’ve been doing — financing shows by people whose engagement and social values they respect.” Unhappy with the political situation in the US, the couple eventually moved to Iceland after bringing several shows there on tour.

Juliette had supported a few of their shows as a technician, both in Iceland and in the US, and they loved her work. One day, they reached out and asked if she would be willing to develop an original show. “They had Googled me by then, and I’ve very little stuff on the internet, but they really did their job and they found the old show I did a long time ago.”

Photo by Art Bicnick

Breaking open

The producers gave Juliette a week to come up with an idea, and she revisited an old concept of hers that had never been developed further due to lack of funding. Flækt (which translates as “entangled”) was born from Juliette’s personal experience with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a mental health condition often characterised by persistent obsessions and rituals, which she developed following a childhood trauma.

“It’s a life celebration. It’s about how you can use all those monsters of yours to have a better life.”

“Between the ages of 12 and 17, I spent one year in a hospital — a paediatric mental hospital. Not every kid experiences that, let’s say. I had all kinds of symptoms. They were not the cause; they were really the symptoms. I called them ‘stickers’ for a really long time..,” Juliette shares. “Diagnosis is extremely important, and I guess this is why I like to raise awareness about it. It’s really important to be careful not to put stickers on too fast, because the spectrums of everything are really big, and I deeply believe that we are all on some kind of spectrum,” she continues.

In the show, Juliette navigates her own obsessions through dancing within shadows, working with fabric, repeating movements, and using systems she has developed to make sense of life’s chaos. The performance has it all: beautiful dance solos that reveal muscles a non-dancer never uses, visually poetic backdrops, and high-tech props, including a first-ever use of Zacktrack in Iceland, a show control system that synchronises audio cues with the action on stage.

“It was really important for us to not make an illustrative show,” says Juliette. “We wanted it to be a storytelling show in a way. The objective was never for people to know my story when they walk out. For me, it’s always about sharing a trip, taking people on a journey — that was always the idea,” she adds. “If somebody has more questions after the show, they can always ask me.”

Even though what a viewer sees on stage seems like a one-person show, Juliette brought together a strong team behind the scenes. “I always try to take a really good team, and a part of the technical director’s job is to know who is better than you,” she smiles. Once the team was composed, Juliette detailed the theme honestly. Facing off with OCD and opening up in front of the team was hard, even triggering. “This is the opposite of therapy,” she says. “It’s facing stuff that was fine with, just stacking it in front of my face for everybody to see and believe it.”

As the final scenes hint, the show is not about being a victim of mental condition, but working with it, and coming out stronger — at least, this is what Juliette does. “It’s a life celebration,” she says. “It’s about how you can use all those monsters of yours to have a better life.”

Catch Flækt on October 4 at Tjarnarbíó, and look out for more shows during the Reykjavík Dance Festival on November 12-16.