Most dancers pick a lane. Manon Bal didn’t.
The Marseille-born performer has spent the last decade moving between worlds that rarely share a room. There’s the formal training of IFPRO Rick Odums in Paris and the Ailey School in New York. And there’s the underground house and waacking scene that shaped her in a completely different way. Right now she’s pulling double duty on two major touring productions, and she co-founded two companies of her own.
She joined Ephrat Asherie Dance in 2016, and that’s where a lot of her current work is anchored. She’s currently touring “The Center Will Not Hold,” a Dorrance Dance production choreographed by Ephrat Asherie and Michelle Dorrance, with stops already behind her in Princeton, Cologne, London, and Fairfax. On that tour she’s also serving as Rehearsal Director and Dance Captain, which means she’s the one keeping the work tight as it travels.
Her other current tour is “Shadow Cities,” Ephrat Asherie Dance’s new piece made in collaboration with Grammy-winning pianist and composer Arturo O’Farrill. The work is a contemplative reflection on the beauty, vastness, and joy of the in-between, and it lands at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival from August 5 through 9. Anyone who’s followed Ephrat Asherie Dance knows the company digs into vernacular forms like breaking, house, hip hop, and vogue, treating them as serious storytelling languages rather than aesthetic decoration.
That approach matches Bal’s own background. She started dancing at five at La Maison de Rejane in Marseille, then moved to Paris at 18 to train at IFPRO Rick Odums in ballet, jazz, Graham, and Horton techniques. In 2015 she auditioned for the Ailey School and got in, which is what brought her to New York. Once she landed, she kept training in concert dance and went deeper into street styles at the same time.
She’s pretty open about what changed her. The underground clubs and parties in New York, the social and intergenerational rooms where house and waacking and popping actually live, reshaped how she moves and how she connects with people while she’s moving. That’s a different kind of training than what you get at a barre, and you can feel the difference in dancers who’ve spent real time in both.
Outside of EAD, she runs Maley Company with Dhele Agbetou. They started it back in 2013, and their latest work, “Paying Tribute to Jazz,” honors their training, their mentor Rick Odums, and the legacy of jazz. They’ve performed it at Theaterlabor and DansArt Theater in Bielefeld, Germany, and they’re now developing it into a full-evening piece. She also co-founded Mozaik Dance with Janine “J9” Micheletti and Sun Kim.
The teaching side of her career is just as active. As a New York City Center Teaching Artist, she leads school residencies and master classes, builds curriculums, and choreographs original work for students. It’s the kind of role that doesn’t always show up in performance bios but tends to be where dancers actually shape the next generation.
Her trajectory from Marseille to Paris to New York hasn’t followed a tidy script, and she doesn’t seem interested in writing one. What she’s building looks more like a long career made of distinct choices about which rooms to be in, which traditions to take seriously, and which collaborators to commit to. You can keep up with her work at @manonbaldance and on the Ephrat Asherie Dance website.
