Jessica Bonamy-Pergament

Jessica Bonamy-Pergament is a French choreographer and musician, founder of Safra, a dance company mixing music and theater arts (2012). She is the daughter of a Sephardic Jewish family on her mother’s side and an Ashkenazi family from Poland on her father’s side. Her four grandparents were not born in France, but landed there in 1946 (for her Polish-Jewish paternal grandparents), and in 1956 (for her Tunisian-Jewish maternal grandparents). They all retained an accent, and not all passed on their mother tongues to their children: neither Polish, Yiddish, nor Arabic; they had to integrate and forget. The choreographic and musical gestures that inhabit her creations elaborate on the silences her family is made of.