Biography
Born in São Paulo, Brazil, Renê Salazar began his career as a dancer, studying jazz and classical ballet before performing internationally with Ireland Ballet and occasionally as a guest artist. Returning to Brazil after a season abroad, he joined the Municipal Theatre of Rio de Janeiro (TMRJ) in 2001, where he worked until 2025. During this period, he was a soloist from 2001 to 2012, while his increasing involvement in stage production and scenographic processes led to a gradual transition from performance to design. Renê balanced work as a performer, stage assistant, and production collaborator while developing his practice through international projects.
Renê holds a BA in Scenography from the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO, 2016) and an MA in Masterstudio Design (Scenography) from the Academy of Art and Design, FHNW Basel (2025). His work encompasses theatre, opera, and dance, including creations in stage and costume design for productions across Europe, South and North America, and Asia.
Recent projects include Alice in Wonderland (Companhia Nacional de Bailado, Lisbon, 2021), Delight (Miami City Ballet, 2024), 4× Rousseau (Cie. La Ronde, Winterthur, 2024), The Bubble (Tanzhaus Basel, 2025), Giselle (Astana Ballet, Kazakhstan, 2018), and Firebird / Scheherazade (Vanemuine Ballet, Estonia, 2022). Earlier work includes Diamante (Ballet of Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires), Touch of Illusion and Diversity (Astana Ballet), and Trilogia Amazônica for the Rio 2016 Olympic Cultural Programme. His designs have also featured in productions for Teatro Municipal do Rio de Janeiro, Teatro Sérgio Porto, Circuito SESC, and Teatro NET.
His master’s practical project The Bubble explored minimal scenography and the redistribution of scenographic craft across sound, light, and performer presence. This project translated his theoretical research into a performative experiment, providing the framework through which he directed and materialized his findings on how spatial design can inform performance experience. Renê continues to work on stage design commissions internationally while preparing to further his studies at the doctoral level, with ongoing interests in theatre, scenography, performance, and institutional cultures.
Working Title of Dissertation Project
From Legend to Mise en Abyme: Ballerinas at Risk in Giselle, La Bayadère and VéroniqueDoisneau
Abstract
This doctoral project investigates how three works in which a female dancer is the central protagonist—Giselle (1841), La Bayadère (1877) and Jérôme Bel’s Véronique Doisneau (2004)—stage ballerinas “at risk,” and what these stagings reveal about changing social imaginaries of women who dance professionally. Moving from Romantic legend to contemporary mise en abyme, the thesis combines close analysis of choreography and scenographic framing with institutional, feminist and postcolonial perspectives.
In Giselle, the project reads the peasant girl who dances herself to death not only through the legend of the Wilis and Christian debates around suicide, but also through nineteenth-century anxieties about fast couple dances, young women’s health and the ballroom as a risky space of desire and relative freedom. In La Bayadère, the fictional bayadère Nikiya is confronted with historical accounts of devadasis and the anti-nautch campaigns, asking how colonial and moral reform discourses shape the ballet’s “Oriental” imagination and the dancer’s vulnerability. In Véronique Doisneau, the thesis examines how the performer’s spoken self-account exposes hierarchy, rank and labour within the corps de ballet, reframing ballet as an institutional economy of visibility.
Across all three cases, the project analyses how spatial organisation, light, grouping and scenic dispositifs distribute agency and disposability. It argues that “risk” is not only narrated but built into representational forms that structure who can appear, who is replaceable and who bears the cost of the repertoire.
Supervisors
Prof. Dr. Christina Thurner (Institute of Theatre Studies, University of Bern)
Dr. Fabiana Senkpiel (Institute for Practices and Theories in the Arts, Bern Academy of the Arts)