The Ringling’s Performing Arts Curator Elizabeth Doud: From France’s Performing Arts Ecosystem to Sarasota

Following a Villa Albertine curatorial trip from Montpellier Danse to the Festival de Marseille and Festival d’Avignon, Elizabeth Doud, Currie-Kohlmann Curator of Performance at The Ringling, reflects on France’s distinctive support for contemporary performance, the ideas she is bringing back to Sarasota, and her upcoming presentation of French choreographer Leïla Ka

1. What struck you most about the French performing arts scene and the ecosystem that supports it?

A striking quality is the relative depth and intentionality of the ecosystem that supports contemporary performance in France. Montpellier was a clear example. The city has made an extraordinary investment in dance, and you can feel that commitment not only during Montpellier Danse, but throughout the year through institutions like L’Agora – a remarkable center for dance makers to experiment and produce. I was especially interested in meeting with their leadership and seeing artists themselves in positions of institutional leadership. That relationship between artists and institutions feels compelling—it creates an infrastructure that is responsive to artistic practice rather than simply presenting artists from the outside.

There is also a remarkable national infrastructure for dance through the Centres chorégraphiques nationaux (CCN), a network that gives choreographers and companies the resources to develop work, maintain artistic practices, and reach audiences over time. We encountered that model again in Marseille in our conversation with Saïdo Lehlouh and Céline Gallet of the Centre Chorégraphique National de Rennes et de Bretagne.

What I found inspiring is that this support doesn’t result in a single aesthetic or institutional model. Quite the opposite: it seems to create the conditions for tremendous experimentation and diversity. Across Montpellier, Marseille, and Avignon, we saw French and international artists working in dance, theater, performance, circus, and hybrid forms, often in unexpected spaces who had benefitted somehow from French institutional arts support.

2. What discoveries, encounters, or ideas from the trip have stayed with you most, and how might they influence your work and programming in Sarasota?

I came home thinking about how much cultural life can be generated when a city makes space for artists—not just for performances, but for the development of ideas, relationships, and new work.

Marseille was especially exciting in that regard. The Festival de Marseille took us into several extraordinary venues throughout the city, and the work we saw reflected the incredible cultural complexity and international character of Marseille. But I was equally intrigued to learn about Actoral, the international festival of contemporary arts that takes place in Marseille in the fall. Our meeting with the Actoral team gave me another perspective on the city as a place where contemporary performance is being developed and encountered throughout the year, not just during one major festival.

And then there was Avignon, where the sheer concentration of artists and ideas is extraordinary. I was particularly moved by our conversation with Rébecca Chaillon, and others from the Festival d’Avignon’s artistic leadership. We were encountering artists from France, Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas, often working across disciplines and challenging conventional ideas about what performance can be.

For me, the takeaway for Sarasota is not that we should try to recreate the French model—we obviously can’t. But it reinforces my interest in building a local ecosystem around performance: bringing adventurous international artists here, creating opportunities for audiences to encounter work they might not otherwise see, and finding ways for those artists to connect with our own artists and communities. I want the Art of Performance program to feel like part of a larger conversation about what performance can be and why it matters.

3. One French artist you’ll soon be presenting in Sarasota is choreographer Leïla Ka. What drew you to her work, and what are you most excited for local audiences to discover?

Leïla Ka is a wonderful example of the kind of artist I was reminded of on this trip—an artist with a very distinctive physical and emotional language who is also deeply connected to the larger questions of our time.

What drew me to her work initially was its extraordinary physicality. There is a kind of urgency and electricity in her movement, but it is never movement for movement’s sake. Her work carries questions about identity, gender, freedom, social expectations, and the ways we inhabit our bodies. She can move between power, vulnerability, humor, and resistance within a single work.

What excites me most is introducing Sarasota audiences to an artist who is internationally recognized but still feels like a discovery. You don’t need a background in contemporary dance to connect with Leïla’s work. It is visceral and deeply human. You feel it before you necessarily analyze it.

And that is one of the things I love about bringing international artists to Sarasota: the opportunity to encounter a perspective that may be culturally specific, but somehow opens into something universal.  We have a local population of French nationals, people from the Francophone diaspora and a community that has a deep sensitivity to the impact of international art. I think Leïla Ka’s will really stay with people.