It is no coincidence that, for centuries, thinkers and creatives of every discipline have regarded dance as the most sublime of all arts: not a translation of life, nor an abstraction from it, but life itself, made manifest through movement, unfolding to a score that is at once rhythmic and profoundly personal.

In Carlota Dudek’s story, that truth finds both fulfillment and proof. French, with Cuban roots, breaking first gave her the means to discover herself and to speak: to inhabit and interpret her own emotions. Then it carried her onto the grandest stage in global sport, the Paris Games, with all the exhilaration and contradiction that such exposure inevitably entails. And finally, it led her back to the source. Back to the essence of it all: the body as narrative, as identity.

Carlota’s path is still being written: a remarkably young collision of art, sport and selfhood in which dancing has slowly stripped itself of performance and expectation, returning instead to something more essential: movement not as entertainment, but as a way of making sense of a life.

‘It’s Just Dancing’ is a hymn to the enduring force, and irresistible pull, of art as a pure form of communication, inward and outward alike. A hymn composed through the intertwined testimonies of Carlota and Sacha Balti, the visual storyteller who distilled this dancer’s richly layered journey into its most universal truths: the echoes that resonate within every contemporary creative spirit.

Together, their streams of consciousness guide us through the project in its entirety: through personal paths that ultimately converged amid Cuban rhythms and within the increasingly rare dimension of art pursued for the pleasure of it and, above all, for the necessity of art itself.

Carlota Dudek 

“I started dancing when I was six years old. It happened almost by accident, during primary school. I remember crying because I wanted to do a sport, but there wasn’t really anything for me. Then someone brought me to a breaking class, and from the very first session I knew I loved it. There was one moment that changed everything for me: the cypher. Everybody formed a circle, and one dancer entered the middle to express themselves. I remember standing there, terrified before entering, wondering what people would think about me. But once I stepped inside, nothing else mattered anymore. I don’t even remember what I danced that day: I only remember the feeling around me. The energy. The support. I immediately understood that this was something I wanted to do forever.

I think dance was already inside me before breaking, because my mother is Cuban. Growing up, she always tried to introduce me to salsa and other dances from our culture, but at the time I didn’t care about any of that. I only wanted to break. Breaking, breaking, breaking… But as I grew older, my relationship with dance started evolving. I was born in France, but since childhood we travelled to Cuba every year for long periods, so I grew up very connected to my roots and to my family there. Then, after Covid and because of the political situation, things changed. I stopped going as often. Suddenly I realised that maybe one day I could lose part of that connection to Cuba. At the same time, my family started thinking more about bringing relatives to Europe for a better life. Of course that would make me happy, but it also means that maybe the Cuba I grew up with could slowly disappear. So after the Olympics I decided to take my first Afro-Cuban dance class. I thought: now I’m a good breaker, but I want to become a better dancer in general — and maybe this is also a way to reconnect with my origins before they fade away.

The Olympics changed a lot for me. Breaking becoming an Olympic discipline created a huge duality inside me: am I an artist or am I an athlete? That question existed everywhere in the community. People were asking whether breaking even belonged at the Olympics, whether we were risking losing our culture and identity. What I always loved about breaking is that it contains everything at once: sport, art, music, culture, individuality. For me it felt natural that it could enter the Olympic world. But at the same time, I could feel things shifting. Before, when I trained, I was asking myself what I wanted to express, what kind of movement felt true to me. Then slowly the questions became different: what do the judges want? What content do I need? What scores can I maximise? I started losing that innocent relationship with dance — the one I had as a child inside the cypher.

Breaking was never supposed to be about formulas. People outside the culture often ask why there aren’t fixed scores for every move, why it feels so subjective. But that’s exactly the beauty of it. Someone can perform the hardest move in the world, but another dancer can simply connect more deeply with the music, with the crowd, with the opponent, and suddenly the entire battle changes. That emotional language matters. Originality matters. Flow matters. During the Olympic process, though, I felt that some of those dimensions disappeared. It became more about technique and content, less about feeling. Less about freedom.

That’s why the title ‘It’s Just Dancing’ means so much to me. It comes from a sentence we kept repeating to ourselves during this period. Sometimes before battles we become obsessed with preparation, pressure, expectations. But then someone says: it’s just dancing. And suddenly everything becomes simpler again. Honestly, some of my favourite battles happen when I’m not fully prepared. Because when you don’t have a strict plan, you’re forced to reconnect with the present moment. Every movement matters. Every gesture, every attitude, every pause. You stop thinking about performance and start feeling the music again. That’s what I was trying to rediscover after the Olympics: the reason I fell in love with dance in the first place.

Working with Sacha on this project became really emotional for me because I trusted him completely. We already knew each other from previous shoots during the Olympic period, but this time was different. This wasn’t about performance anymore. It was about something much more personal. The Afro-Cuban choreography at the end of the film is something I had barely shared with anyone before. I shaped it together with choreographer Royma Roman and even my boyfriend had never seen me dance like that. The breaking community didn’t know this side of me either. So I needed to feel safe in order to express it. Sacha understood that immediately. He gave me the space to show a version of myself that usually stays hidden.

I’ve always felt slightly outside the stereotypical image of breaking. It’s a very masculine culture, and one of the first things my coach told me was: don’t dance like a boy — dance like a girl. That stayed with me forever. Even inside breaking, I’ve always tried to find elegance, femininity, fluidity. That’s why fashion matters so much to me too. Clothing changes movement. The same move feels completely different depending on what you’re wearing. In breaking, outfits are part of the dance itself. During the Olympics there were moments where sponsors wanted all of us to look identical, to represent France in the same way. But for me the real question has always been: what makes me different? What expresses who I am as a woman, as a dancer, as Carlota?

The Afro-Cuban dance itself was difficult for me at first because my entire body has been built around breaking for almost twenty years. My strength, my posture, my reflexes — everything belonged to breaking. Starting from zero again was painful. I hated feeling bad at something. But at the same time, I realised I needed that feeling. In breaking I had maybe become too afraid of looking weak or trying something unfamiliar. This dance forced me to become a student again. It humbled me. And what fascinated me most is that every movement carries an intention behind it. It’s spiritual. It’s not just choreography. There is meaning inside every gesture. That connection gave me strength and helped me reconnect with myself.

Today dance means something completely different to me than it did when I was six years old. At the beginning, I danced simply because I loved it. Then it became competition, performance, pressure. Now, after everything that happened around the Olympics, dance has become a way to find myself again. When I go into practice now, I ask myself: how do I want to feel? What do I want people to see inside me? Dance gives me confidence in a way nothing else does. It makes me feel powerful. And honestly, I think that’s what I would want people to take from my story: to find something that makes them feel alive enough to fight for it with a smile.

My father didn’t really understand breaking when I was younger. But my mother always said: if she loves something, let her do it completely. That is probably the greatest gift anyone ever gave me. Because today, even during difficult moments, I can still wake up and dedicate my life to something I truly love. There are hard days, of course. There are moments where I question everything. But if I have to struggle, I’m happy that it’s inside dance. Because even when it hurts, it still feels like my place.”

Sacha Balti 

“I started working with athletes around 2022, just before the Olympic Games. At the time, I was at the beginning of my photographic career. I was working in fashion, at Louis Vuitton, but what I really wanted was to tell stories. I’ve always been passionate about sport, so I started contacting athletes directly on Instagram. Athletics, judo, fencing… people who were at the top of their disciplines. I would send them a message and say: if you want, I can come to your training, take pictures, and share them with you. If you like them, you use them. If not, no problem. It was all pro bono.

In France, athletes are asked to do everything. They have to be good at their sport, but also good at communication, management, accountability. I wanted to help them, but also help myself build a relationship with athletes. So I started spending time with them, and little by little I realised there were stories everywhere. I kept asking myself the same question: why are you doing this? In sports where nobody really knows your name, where there isn’t much money, why do you still want to jump higher, run faster, push yourself that far? I really wanted to understand that. Then I realised I especially wanted to focus on women athletes. Whenever I spoke about the athletes I was photographing, people knew all the men, but none of the women: even though the women were number one in their categories. They were among the best, and still nobody knew them. So I thought maybe we should start telling those stories differently.

At the same time, I was still connected to the fashion world. The stylists I worked with also wanted to create something more personal. So I told them: come with me, let’s meet these athletes and make beautiful stories around them. Not just stories about performance, but about who they are as people. That became the beginning of my work with athletes. Eventually, during the Olympic Games in 2024, we turned that work into a book and an exhibition.

Photography had already been part of my life for a long time. My father had a camera, and I was always the person taking pictures during holidays or with friends. I never studied photography formally. I went to business school, worked in advertising and production, even created my own company at some point. But photography always stayed with me, especially analog photography. What I love about film is that you don’t fully know what you have. The people you photograph don’t know either. There’s something very honest about that. You shoot three rolls, maybe only two images really matter, but those are the images you have. You can’t control everything. You have to accept the imperfections, the accidents, the bad pictures too. I’m someone very perfectionist, so maybe that’s also why I like analog photography so much. It forces me to let go a little bit.

Sport was always present in my life too. I did fencing when I was younger, but honestly I didn’t really think about why I was doing it. I just enjoyed it. Now, working with athletes in my thirties, I understand much more clearly why sport matters. What fascinates me most are athletes themselves. I admire their focus, even if sometimes it’s difficult because everything in their lives has to revolve around one goal. They have to be very centred on themselves. I like sharing moments with them, understanding them, but also staying slightly outside of that world.

Carlota contacted me first. At the beginning, she simply wanted me to film her cuban-inspired dancing. I had already been thinking about video because clients often asked me if I could shoot films alongside photography. Usually I said no, but sometimes during photo shoots I already imagined the film in my head. We met for coffee, and she started talking to me about what happened after the Olympic Games. She told me she wanted to reconnect with why she started dancing in the first place. She wanted to return to herself a little bit. 

What really stayed with me was the way she spoke about the difference between being an athlete and being an artist. Before the Olympics, she was first a dancer, an artist. Then suddenly she had to become an athlete. And because breaking entered the Olympics, everything around her changed: the federation, the pressure, the expectations, the sponsors. Then breaking disappeared from the Los Angeles Games, and overnight things changed again. I became very interested in that tension between art and performance. I didn’t want to make another film simply about the Olympics or about failure after the Olympics. We’ve already seen those stories many times. What interested me was something more personal. When she told me her story, I felt like I understood part of it, even if I could never fully feel what she felt herself.

The moment that stayed with me the most in the film is when she says maybe she should have trained less because, at the end of the day, it’s just dancing. Sometimes I feel the same way with photography. Sometimes I shoot too much because I feel pressure, because I want to produce, produce, produce. And then afterwards the pictures no longer feel like me. So, I need to stop completely for a while, and when I come back, I feel connected to photography again. As photographers, we also live with performance. We need clients, campaigns… people ask you how many followers you have, which athletes you photographed, what brands you worked with. You need those things to survive, to pay rent, to keep going. Sometimes you do work you don’t even want to share because it means nothing to you creatively. But at the same time, you also need projects like ‘It’s Just Dancing,’ otherwise you forget why you started doing it in the first place.

What touched me about this project was that everybody involved genuinely wanted to tell Carlota’s story. Nobody really did it for money. When Carlota showed the film to her mother, she cried. I showed it to my girlfriend, and she cried too. Carlota is still so young, and yet she already asks herself questions that many people only ask much later in life: where do I come from? Who am I? What do I really want from this? I find that fascinating about athletes. They grow up very quickly. 

What I admire most about Carlota is that she realised she didn’t fully enjoy the Olympics the way she wanted to. She understood that something inside her dance had changed. And now she wants to reconnect with what dancing originally meant to her, even knowing that financially things are much more uncertain now. For her, dancing became the answer again. Breaking is still part of her. She doesn’t want to abandon it. But now she wants to understand how to put herself inside the movement again, instead of only chasing performance. That’s why I wanted the film to include both sides: the breaking itself and the path that leads to the final choreography.

When we filmed inside the castle, there was a moment where everyone simply stopped talking and watched her dance. You could hear her body hitting the ground. The impact, the physicality of it. On television you don’t always realise how intense breaking really is. Seeing it live is completely different. I had never really thought of myself as someone interested in dance before this project. But maybe I had simply never seen someone dance like that in front of me. It felt very true. And I think that’s what moves people in general. When something feels completely honest, you either feel it immediately or you don’t. That’s also why I didn’t want the film to only show dancing. I wanted people who don’t know breaking, or don’t know Carlota, to understand where all those movements were coming from emotionally.

The final choreography was originally the piece she asked me to record from the very beginning. It was deeply connected to her Cuban roots. She spoke a lot about Cuba, about her family, about what her mother transmitted to her growing up. We worked around that idea visually too. The locations mattered a lot. I really wanted an empty swimming pool because I liked the feeling of emptiness it created around her body. Finding it was actually very complicated. Eventually I found this castle outside Paris, and after a very strange negotiation involving PSG tickets, we got access to the place. In the end, the children of the man taking care of the castle got to see PSG for the first time, so everybody was happy.

Fashion was important too, but in a very minimal way. I worked again with Martina Bruno, the stylist I already collaborated with on previous athlete projects. We wanted something pure. We wanted to move Carlota slightly away from the usual street-breaking aesthetic and create something softer, more feminine, more connected to her Cuban identity. But at the same time, I didn’t want fashion to dominate the project. This wasn’t about clothes or brands. The important thing was simply to create the right atmosphere around her.

For me, that’s always the most important thing during a shoot. Of course I want strong images, but more than that I want people to feel good while we create them. If the atmosphere is wrong, the pictures don’t matter anymore. At the end, this project became something very simple. It became a story about somebody trying to reconnect with the reason they started creating in the first place.”