— Suzanne Degennaro

Suzanne Degennaro

— Supported by FAIR-E / CCN de Rennes et de Bretagne

The Dancefloor as Political Space

Through whacking, Suzanne Degennaro has developed an artistic language in which the body becomes a space of memory, care, and resistance.

Suzanne Degennaro is an Italian-French dancer and choreographer based in Paris. Her work explores the blurred boundaries of identity, gender, and embodied memory. Her artistic language emerges at the intersection of whacking—a dance born in the queer clubs of 1970s Los Angeles—and a sensitive, autobiographical approach to movement.

Between 2018 and 2023, she trained in Paris at several professional dance schools, exploring a wide range of styles including hip hop, house, dancehall, afro, contemporary, jazz, ballet, and theatre. Along the way, she discovered whacking—first by chance, then as a necessity. During the lockdowns, she immersed herself fully in the practice before joining the collective Ma Dame Paris in 2022. Whacking soon became a way to reconnect with her personal history and her intersex experience, long silenced and made invisible.

As a performer, she has worked with several companies and has appeared at the Opéra de Paris in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette. She also performs in Saïdo Lehlouh’s Apaches Opéra and Témoin, and collaborates with Mounia Nassangar on the creation STUCK. A member of the whacking collective Delacrème and the intersex advocacy organisation OII France, she develops a performative and political approach to club culture as a space for memory, care, and resistance.

An Alter Ego artist produced by the CCN de Rennes et de Bretagne, she will premiere her first solo work, Limbo, in 2026 as part of UNDER/GROUND.