delicate people is a project by Ruth Childs and Cécile Bouffard, combining dance and sculpture, conceived as a journey through vignettes exploring figures and motifs of troubling identities and precise gestures.

Cécile Bouffard’s sculptural work invites movement: a certain contour encourages a grip or touch; a curve, a caress. Ruth Childs responds with her intuitions and emotions, describing this sensation as a “graphic engine.” The implied objects and behaviors generate a continual metamorphosis of gesture, rhythm, and mood. It is this fluid, unfixed nature of things and situations that attracts them.

The term delicate echoes both illustrated figures (such as the hermit, the outcast, the “non-normative” being) and their working process. To be delicate and attentive, without a fixed intention or a stable choreographic narrative, but capable of shifting angles, grips, and searching elsewhere. Through this intuitive, digressive, and deconstructive approach, Ruth Childs and Cécile Bouffard free themselves from a traditional production and presentation process, which consists of restaging the same choreography. They adopt a multi-faceted experimental approach, offering thus a shifting, long-term story.

Biographies

Ruth Childs

Anglo-American dancer and choreographer Ruth Childs was born in 1984 in London.

She grew up in the United States, where she studied dance and music. In 2003, she moved to Geneva to complete her dance training at the Ballet Junior de Genève. She has worked with various choreographers and directors, including Foofwa d’Imobilité, La Ribot, Gilles Jobin, Massimo Furlan, Marco Berrettini, and Yasmine Hugonnet.

In 2018, she created her first stage piece, The Goldfish and the Inner Tube, in collaboration with Stéphane Vecchione. She premiered her first solo, fantasia, at the ADC in Geneva in October 2019, followed by her second solo, Blast!, in 2022, which won the Swiss Performing Arts Prize that same year, recognizing an outstanding choreographic production. From 2023 to 2024, Ruth is an associate artist at the CCN2 – National Choreographic Center of Grenoble. She created Fun Times, her first group piece, in 2024 at L’Arsenic, Lausanne.

Her work has been presented worldwide: Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, Biennal de Danza de Cali, ImPulsTanz in Vienna, and Crossing the Line in New York, among others. Ruth is currently one of the artists in residence at L’Arsenic – Contemporary Performing Arts Center in Lausanne.

Cécile Bouffard

Visual artist Cécile Bouffard was born in 1987 and lives and works in Paris.

Her sculptural work, oscillating between the familiar and the strange, suggestion and assertion, seems to resist definition and cultivates an ambiguity that prevents categorization, identities, or uses.

She has had solo exhibitions at the Centre d’art contemporain Les Capucins in Embrun (2019) with Pourquoi marcher quand on peut danser, babosa, babosa at the Guadalajara90210 gallery in Mexico, High by the phlegme at Rond-Point Projects in Marseille, basket case at La Salle de bains in Lyon (2022), and Stinky Jade at Treize (2024). Her work has also been shown in group exhibitions such as La fugitive at Crédac (2022), Molinier rose saumon at Frac Aquitaine (2023), Your friends and neighbours at High Art gallery, Hors de la nuit des normes, hors de l’énorme ennui at Palais de Tokyo (2023), L’hymne aux murènes at Triangle (2024), El fantasma de Tenesse at Galerie Marcelle Alix (2025), and as a duo with Crazy Toads at CAC Brétigny (2023).

Since 2018, Cécile Bouffard has led several lesbian collective projects such as VNOUJE and has worked with the collective La Gousse, a lesbian culinary reappropriation project. She frequently collaborates through drawing with the collective Dacodyke on book covers, fanzines, and t-shirts. Since 2019, she has worked with photographer Camille Vivier on various projects.