For our sixth special people article, we introduce you to Johanna Faye, a hip-hop dancer and choreographer, who founded the Black Sheep dance company with Saïdo Lehlouh in 2015. She is also a member of the FAIR-E Collective, which has been the collegial director of the Centre Chorégraphique National de Rennes et de Bretagne since January 2019. And you may have seen her in Angèle’s clip “Jalousie”, or at the 2019 Avignon Festival with FAIR-E. She is a gentle and powerful presence who manifests herself with few words, but with the authority and wisdom of a body and mind that are both 100% free and aligned. Remember her vibe!
Our Special People inspire us with their style, their journey, their way of living their life, or their relationship to perfume. Sillages Paris is a Haute Parfumerie company that wants to celebrate originality and singularity: both in the perfume, and in the people who wear it. Indeed, we believe that each of us is special, so each fragrance should be special. Sometimes we meet people that truly inspire us, and it’s their stories that we want to share with you. These special people can be people we run into, or our own customers we love to meet. For each of them, we have created the perfect Sillage.
Dance as a vehicle for self-discovery
Johanna radiates an instinctive and natural wisdom: you can feel it living in a world where everything is part of a system. 100% aligned with her body and who she is, Johanna allows herself to be guided by her instincts, both in her art and her life. Step by step, she is charting her own course, and is leaving her mark on the contemporary dance landscape in France.
At the start of the school year, you can watch her perform her duo ISKIO at the L’Imprévu Cultural Center in Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône. Télérama puts it this way: “Saïdo Darwin and Johanna Faye, two hip-hop dancer-choreographers who have been talked about for some time, have created a duo called Iskio, in which they reinvent the movements of a love story of today.”
Opening communication with the body
Johanna started dancing at a late age. After growing up in the Paris suburbs, she discovered hip-hop and break dancing at the age of 17, both of which proved to be her passion. She then entered the International Academy of Dance, where she studied jazz, contemporary and classical dance for a year. After that, she travelled to Brazil, where she danced with a company for a few months. Gradually, she started to challenge herself with harder dance pieces. She quickly developed her own body vocabulary and became a choreographer. Using Black Sheep and FAIR-E, Johanna promotes a quasi-political approach to dance, which she views as a way to foster greater participation.
For Johanna, the body is sensitive. It is anchored in nature, which allows us to explore all our senses. She says, “Dance is a tool for communicating with myself. It allows me to be as close as possible to what I feel, even when I can’t necessarily put words to it. When I dance, I don’t need to think anymore. I am in my body, in my sensations, in my emotions, in my present.”
Johanna Faye seems to be an old soul
Listening to her, you feel like you’re hearing ancient wisdom. She has a vision of life where nothing is controllable or permanent, but rather, everything is beautiful and interconnected. This explains why she takes a “no-nonsense” approach to life that focuses on the present. She welcomes her emotions and feelings, observing and experiencing them without magnifying them beyond what is necessary. Johanna says, “I don’t run away from suffering: I find that suffering can be beautiful! But I don’t want suffering to define me; I don’t want it to make me alive. I never want to go into the dramatic. Nothing happens in life that one cannot accept.”
““In a society of acceleration and where the consumption of images seems to be de rigueur, Johanna Faye presses pause and offers, with Afastado em, a time distortion during which three women with different backgrounds and horizons continue to walk alone and together.“
At a time when society is rapidly evolving, and when the growing consumption of media seems to have become a necessity, Johanna Faye presses pause and, in Afastado em, proposes a time warp in which three women from different backgrounds and paths continue to walk alone but at the same time together.
Johanna is inspired by the people she encounters every day. “I’m fascinated by people; I think everyone is beautiful. Sometimes I feel like everyone is painted in India ink… I can look at someone and blink for hours, for example.”
Be yourself because everyone else is taken
Dancing allowed Johanna to get to know and discover himself from a very early age. Her relationship with her body does not allow any falsehood, and it’s this relationship that gives her a very real authenticity. Johanna is able to say things like, “Your truth suits me,” which sets the scene. “What I like is when people stay themselves, grounded in themselves. I hate pretending. Pretending to be something else is indicative of low self-esteem. You feel a sense of inadequacy when you pretend to be somebody else.” And for Johanna, living your truth means accepting that you are natural and different. She says, “When you’re an artist, you don’t fit in the boxes. In fact, my company is called Black Sheep.”
“Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been a mom for three years that heightens that awareness even more. I have this need to deconstruct pretenses, labels, and disconnection with oneself and others. Being a mother is fascinating because you bring a new human being into the world. That is to say, a being who has only her senses and no social construction, and who is much richer in nuances. In fact, babies’ emotional intelligence is much greater than ours. The birth of my baby has made me much more alive at every moment.”
Stop bothering yourself with beauty
Despite the body and the “physical” being at the centre of her art, Johanna’s relationship to beauty goes beyond the norm. Her relationship to her body is more organic since she looks elsewhere for beauty in nature and the intensity of her sensations. So don’t look for elaborate beauty routine tips from her. She says, “I don’t like being told I’m beautiful. There’s nothing I can do about it. My mother is quite coquettish, and she’s very afraid of getting older. But I’m in the opposite extreme. My only beauty product, and almost the only thing I have, is a jar of shea butter that I brought back from Africa, and I use it for everything. Today, when I get up, I shower, and then I put on shea butter, homemade deodorant, and then some perfume.”
“Smells are very important to me; they inspire and excite me. I love roses, orange blossom, jasmine, musk, bergamot… For me, smells are home. It puts me in my body. I put patchouli essential oil in my laundry, but I couldn’t wear it on me. I also always keep lavender essential oil in my bag, which I use when I’m stressed.”
Johanna Faye and her skin perfumes
While some of us like to maintain a wardrobe full of fragrances, others have remained faithful to a single perfume for a very long time. Some like to change perfumes to match their mood or outfit, while others wear theirs religiously like a second skin. Johanna is one of them. For her, a perfume shouldn’t shout out; it’s her skin as well as her identity. Far from the overly theatrical or gender-specific scents, we recognized something consistent in all the fragrances she wore: scents that were often floral, spicy, transparent and light, and with a touch of animal notes (the skin effect).
So, is Johanna Faye going to change her perfume?
“I started wearing perfume early. When I was little, perfume went with my style, either as a complement or a contrast. Today, it’s more to take care of me. In fact, it’s so much a part of me that I feel that if I don’t wear my perfume, people won’t recognize me. So I take my perfume with me everywhere. It’s like my skin. When I told a friend I was coming to Sillages Paris from somewhere else, he was shocked and asked if I was going to change my perfume!”
Spoiler alert: we managed to find the perfect Sillage for Johanna Faye 😉! Johanna’s Sillage is an intimate, sensual, and sweet perfume. It has a skin signature that opens with luminous citrus, and whose floral heart (a sublime Iris blended with Rose) expresses itself in a “baby’s bottom” accord.
And the verdict? Johanna says, “It’s become my comforter fragrance, so I take the sample with me everywhere I go. With the slightest touch, I put a dab of it on the inside of my wrists. I love it because it’s the only perfume I can wear with the one I already have.” Phew!
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