Peeping Tom (Belgium)

Peeping Tom is a Belgian dance theatre company, founded by Gabriela Carrizo (I/AR) and Franck Chartier (F). 

Peeping Tom’s hallmark is a hyperrealist aesthetic anchored to a concrete set. The space feels familiar, such as a retirement home in Vader, two trailer homes in 32 rue Vandenbranden or a living room in Le Salon. In these settings, the directors break open the realism and create an unstable universe that defies the logic of time, space and mood. Isolation leads to an unconscious world of nightmares, fears and desires, which the creators deftly use to shed light on the dark side of a character or a community. You become the witness – or rather, the voyeur? – of what usually remains hidden and unsaid. Presented using a rich imagery, a fascinating battle arises, against one’s environment and against oneself. They explore an extreme language of movement and performance: nothing is ever gratuitous, and the human condition is throughout a main source of inspiration.

Using film editing techniques, they manage to extend the limits of the plot, which always comes across more as a contour than as something you can pin down with any certainty. The ‘huis clos’ of family situations remains for Peeping Tom a major source of creativity.

Gabriela Carrizo 

Gabriela has been the artistic director of Peeping Tom, along with Franck Chartier, since they co-founded the company in 2000. She was ten years old when she started dancing at a multidisciplinary school that had, at the time, the only group of contemporary dance for children and teenagers. Under Norma Raimondi’s direction, the school went on to become Córdoba’s University Ballet, where Gabriela danced for a couple of years, and where she created her first choreographies.

She moved to Europe when she was nineteen, and over the years she worked with Caroline Marcadé, Les Ballets C de la B (La Tristeza Complice, 1997, and Iets op Bach, 1998), Koen Augustijnen (Portrait intérieur, 1994) and Needcompany (Images of Affection, 2001). She never stopped working on her own choreographies, and these years saw the production of a solo piece, E tutto sará d’ombra e di caline, and Bartime, a collaboration with Einat Tuchman and Lisi Estaras. She also created the choreography for the opera Wolf (2002), by Les Ballets C de la B. She plays a leading role in Fien Troch’s movie Kid (2012), and in 2013 she created the short piece The missing door (2013) for the Nederlands Dans Theater – NDT 1 in The Hague. In 2015, Carrizo created The Land, a collaboration with the Munich Residenztheater. More recently, she worked with Franck Chartier on 31 Rue Vandenbranden (2018) an adaptation with Le Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon of Peeping Tom’s original. The new piece opened the prestigious Biennale de la Danse de Lyon in 2018. In 2022, Gabriela directed La Ruta, her second short piece for Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT 1).

Franck Chartier 

Franck has been the artistic director of Peeping Tom, along with Gabriela Carrizo, since they co-founded the company in 2000. He started dancing when he was eleven, and at the age of fifteen his mother sent him to study classical ballet at Rosella Hightower in Cannes. Between 1986 and 1989, he was a part of Maurice Béjart’s Ballet du 20ème Siècle. The following three years, he worked with Angelin Preljocaj, dancing in Le spectre de la rose at the Opéra de Paris.   He moved to Brussels in 1994, to perform in Rosas’ production Kinok (1994), and he stayed on, working on duos with Ine Wichterich and Anne Mouselet, as well as in productions by Needcompany (Tres, 1995) and Les Ballets C de la B: La Tristeza Complice (1997), Iets op Bach (1997) and Wolf (2002). In 2013, he created 33 rue Vandenbranden for the Göteborg Opera, based on Peeping Tom’s 32 rue Vandenbranden, and he developed the choreography for the opera Marouf, Savetier du Caire by Jerôme Deschamps at the Opéra Comique de Paris. For Nederlands Dans Theater, he directed The lost room in 2015, for which he received the prestigious Dutch prize ‘Swan Most Impressive Dance Production 2016’.   2017 marked the world premiere of The hidden floor, his second collaboration with the Dutch company. More recently, he worked with Gabriela Carrizo on 31 Rue Vandenbranden (2018) an adaptation with Le Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon of Peeping Tom’s original. The new piece opened the prestigious Biennale de la Danse de Lyon in 2018. In 2021, he directed Dido & Aeneas, a collaboration between Peeping Tom, Le Concert d’Astrée and the Grand Théâtre de Genève.