Alexandra Gérard

She belongs to two schools at once. The Russian, passed down by Margarita Smirnova, a star of the Bolchoï. The French, learned at the Opéra de Paris, where she danced alongside Serge Peretti and Michel Renault, principal dancers who were her teachers. Jazz comes to her from the Matt Mattox lineage, contemporary from her work with Carolyn Carlson and Gigi Căciuleanu. She is a State-certified dance teacher, holding the State Diploma in Dance Teaching awarded by the French Ministry of Culture. Each discipline, she says, "translates, in its own specific way, the inexhaustible richness of the human psyche."

As a dancer, she joined the C.C.O. Ballets de l’Ouest, Itinérance, the Ballets du Goéland, the Taniets Ballet, and the R.T.B.F. very young. She placed at the competition of the French Dance Federation in a neo-classical pas de deux with Pédro Paulo Rosa, and she was admitted by audition to the workshop of Carolyn Carlson and Larrio Ekson.

As a choreographer, she founded the company Mozaïk Ballet’ in Nantes, which has shown her pieces since 2002 in competitions, festivals, and galas. The early works, among them "Virus", presented at the competition of the French Dance Federation, spoke of alienation, of a person overrun by their own images. Since 2010, she has looked instead toward dream and the imagination.

As a teacher, she directs L’Atelier du Mouvement, her dance school in Nantes: classical and pointe work, modern jazz, street jazz, contemporary, from awakening classes at age four to the professional level. She wants to "make classical dance more accessible to everyone, democratising teaching methods while preserving the academicism of classical." Each year, the school steps onto the stage.

Alexandra Gérard holds the State Diploma in Dance Teaching awarded by the French Ministry of Culture, in the classical, jazz, and contemporary options, with the highest distinction (« mention excellence »).