Antonin Comestaz is a French choreographer based in The Hague (NL). His work is characterized by a playful yet incisive tone and a highly personal, detailed movement language drawing on mime, folk dance, breakdance, commercial dance, ballet, contemporary dance, and cartoon imagery. Within a single piece, drastic shifts in style and genre often coexist, woven together by a refined sense of the absurd. Beneath the humor and apparent lightness, his work can turn dark or cruel, subtly unsettling the familiar and revealing an acute awareness of life’s emotional contradictions and fluid complexity.

Antonin creates works for a wide range of companies and renowned dance academies. From 2013 to 2023, the Korzo production house in The Hague regularly supported him. Alongside his choreographic practice, he composes music for both his own works and commissions from other choreographers. His musical practice continues to deepen his choreographic writing, with an ongoing investigation into the relationship between sound and movement at the core of his artistic approach.

A graduate of the Paris Opera Ballet School (1999), Antonin danced with the Paris Opera Ballet (1999 to 2000), Hamburg Ballet (2000 to 2008), Tanz Theater München (2008 to 2010), Ballet Mainz (2010 to 2012), and Scapino Ballet Rotterdam (2012 to 2013). During these years, he created several short works, including Flesh and Blood, selected for the 22nd International Choreographic Competition Hannover (2008); Playground for Gärtnerplatz Tanz Theater, Munich (2009); and She, which received the First Prize for the Dancer, Third Prize for Choreography, and the Audience Award at the 14th Stuttgart International Solo Dance Theater Festival (2010).

In 2013, Antonin began his freelance career as a choreographer. That same year, he created Out of the Grey, a cross-genre work commissioned by Korzo, and was selected as a Priority Company by the Aerowaves network in 2014. In 2015, he created and independently produced the duet Then, Before, Now, Once More, which toured extensively throughout the Netherlands and was invited to numerous international choreographic competitions and festivals.

His first full evening work, Surface Image, earned him the prestigious BNG Bank Dance Award 2018, leading to the creation and touring of the duet Ü. In the same year, he created the solo Brandon for Parvaneh Scharafali, coproduced by Korzo and Netherlands Dance Theater. In 2019, he was invited to create a work for the ten dancers of the Round House Company in Shenzhen. Later that year, Korzo and NDT commissioned his third full evening production, For All We Know, which premiered as one of the opening performances of the Holland Dance Festival 2020.

Other works include the solo Gömböc (2020) for Ema Yuasa and Zèbre (2021) for Sara Angelucci, further demonstrating his ability to create striking and memorable female stage characters. In January 2021, he made the dance film 2m², which was showcased and awarded at several international dance film festivals. In 2022, he created Lamb Limbo for Scapino Ballet Rotterdam’s The Square 2. In March 2023, he created So Far, So Good for the inaugural edition of Conny Janssen Danst’s NEXT. On December 1, 2023, Antonin marked his tenth anniversary as a maker and his farewell to Korzo with a double bill featuring Ah oui? Pas., created for Of Curious Nature (Bremen), and Stay with Me(!), a duet for Aya Misaki and Hiro Murata. Stay with Me(!) was selected for the 6th edition of RIDCC and the Nederlandse Dansdagen 2024.

His most recent work, Bevor ich es vergesse … (Before I forget…), is a full evening production for Dance Company Osnabrück, created for the main stage of Theater Osnabrück and premiered in October 2026 to great success. Antonin conceived the piece and created the choreography with the company’s 14 dancers, while also composing the music and shaping the visuals and lighting. Developed in dialogue with dramaturg Britta Aliena Horwath and set and costume designer Sophia Debus, the work takes dementia as its subject, approaching memory and its loss with the humor, tenderness, and underlying unease that mark his work.