Louis Manuel Maxime Montes is a French performance, dance and visual artist. His practice and movement emerge from high-physical improvisation and theatrical research on how the body as a receptacle of experiences, can unleash fleshy, hard but gentle, crude images. His latest solo work Under explores how identity and performance as a socially learned skill shift through the use of masks and question how the discarded and trashed away can actually be the core of new beginnings. He implements mask making and puppetry to his stage work, recently performing The Dog and the Other by Pau Camps Sanpedro.
Louis is the co-founder of NoFence Collective, touring works around Austria and Europe. Together with the 4 other members, they create works that wield satire as a political weapon, embracing the ridiculous, the awkward and using humour, intimacy and absurdity as transformative practices against fixed identities, rigid norms and the commodification of art.
He joined the Cullberg ensemble as an apprentice in July 2026 right after graduating from the 4 years training program in SEAD. He completed his bachelor’s in Dance & Performance art at the University Bordeaux Montaigne, at the same time as his State Diploma in Teaching Contemporary dance in 2022. He has performed in venues such as La Manufacture CDCN Bordeaux, Stadtgalerie Lehen, Salzburger Fiestpiele, Mikis Theodorakis Theatre as well as in French dance company Chendance.