Envahisseurs is a global project led by dancer and director Deicy Sanches and dancer and designer Teddy Sanches. Their aim is to highlight the hip-hop and social dances invented by black and Latino minorities in the United States (on the streets and in clubs) at the end of the 20th century. For Deicy and Teddy, these dances are charged with historical, social and cultural meaning. To this end, Envahisseurs weaves a balanced dialogue between these dances and other art forms, and incorporates current themes such as decolonialism and feminism.
Deicy and Teddy express their vision through a global artistic approach: a battle at the Centre Pompidou in 2019, a film on film exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo as part of the Audi Talents prize, research into clothing at Villa Kujoyama, performances for Nuit Blanche Kyoto, the Chichas de la pensée, the Collection Lambert, and many more.
Teddy Sanches
Teddy Sanches, a French designer and dancer of Cape Verdean origin, studied at ENSCI - Les Ateliers in Paris, from which he graduated with honours in industrial design in 2019, with his Envahisseurs Battle project, an event combining design and hip-hop dance at the Centre Pompidou. With this project, for which he employed multiple artistic fields, he won the Audi Talents prize in 2019 and the Villa Kujoyama residency in Kyoto in 2020.
Hip-hop culture is part of his daily life, and he sees it as a fertile playground for the needs of tomorrow's world. The street is his main inspiration, particularly the world of the building site and its workers. Clothing is an object that he has been studying since his dissertation. Beyond its functional aspect, he sees it as a genuine tool of representation and identity assertion.
Teddy Sanches, who defines himself as working in a global way, lives and works in the Paris region around two activities. On the one hand, he co-directs the Envahisseurs project with director and dancer Deicy Sanches, with which they aim to promote hip-hop and social dance through films, performances and events.
On the other hand, the design studio Hall Haus, which he co-founded in 2020 with designers Abdoulaye Niang and Sammy Bernoussi and engineer Zakari Boukhari. They advocate an approach that aims to make design accessible through three fields: the object, the experience and the transmission. They were winners of the "À l'Oeuvre" residency at the Lafayette Anticipations Foundation in 2020, finalists in the 2022 "Design Parade" festival at Villa Noailles, and have collaborated with Ikea, Théorème Éditions, Nike, Mobilier National, etc.
Deicy Sanches
Deicy Sanches is a French director and dancer of Cape Verdean origin. She holds a Master's degree in Arts, Literature and Languages with a major in Cinema and Audiovisual Studies from the University of Paris Nanterre.
Her heritage and sensitivity have led her to explore issues of identity, colonisation and bodily memory through movement, using a variety of media: film, dance and music. In 2020, in collaboration with designer Teddy Sanches, she wrote and directed the film Envahisseurs, shot on film, about hip-hop dance and the notion of the circle, which she exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo as part of the Audi talents programme. Passionate about house music and clubbing culture, she is interested in post-colonial musical movements that mix electronic music with traditional and modern music from so-called Portuguese-speaking African countries.
In 2022, she was awarded the Trame residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, where she worked on writing a documentary film about clubbing as a dance of resistance within the underground hip-hop dance community in the Paris region.
In 2023, she directed a short dance film, In Between, at Villa Kujoyama in Japan, which questions the body and the different feminine and masculine energies that make it up, as well as its relationship to the living world, inspired by African visions of the world in which Man is intertwined with the cosmos, nature and the community.
