Mathieu Desseigne-Ravel was born in 1979 in Avignon, “a city surrounded by ramparts, whose symbol is a bridge that leads to nowhere”, in his words.
During his adolescence, “driven by desires for something else”, he will discover acrobatics and hip-hop dance in the hall of a local MJC.
Continuing on this journey, he follows a five-year training at the National Center of Circus Arts in Châlons-en-Champagne to become an “acrobat-balancer-dancer”.
At the end of this training, by chance and through auditions, he joins les ballets C de la B of Alain Platel. He stays and develops his art there during six years, creating vsprs, pitié! and Out of Context – for Pina.
In 2006, he joins Nabil Hemaïzia and Sylvain Bouillet – two teenage companions – to found the company Collectif 2 Temps 3 Mouvements. “Contemporary dance”, “new circus” and “hip-hop”, are the labels given to their work and which they choose to research and challenge to understand their meaning. Together they create Reflets, La stratégie de l’échec and Et des poussières.
In 2014, Mathieu Desseigne-Ravel and Sylvain Bouillet leave the collective to give birth, with Lucien Reynes to Naïf Production, a structure without format, without hierarchy: an authentic artistic workspace that apprehends the creation as the resultant of ” a fully collective process” that “cultivates differences and supports the circulation of body and mind movements”.
Within Naïf Production they develop collective projects, such as Je suis fait du bruit des autres (2014), La Mécanique des Ombres (The Mechanics of Shadows, 2016) and Des gens qui dansent, a piece for five acrobats whose creation is scheduled for 2018.
They also create projects carrying their own singularity. In 2017, Mathieu Desseigne Ravel starts a reflection on the question of the solo. La chair a ses raisons, a solo of the flesh rather than a solo of the body. An attempt to continue to “understand this moment where the individual testimony transcends its anecdote to speak to us, to delve into this manifest and fugitive common ground that connects us all”.