Isabelle Duthoit completed her clarinet studies at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon, under Jacques Di Donato. She turned very early on towards contemporary music, working with numerous composers. She subsequently found that free improvisation was the field for her. She plays and works with a range of artists on the internationality experimental scene: Dieb13, Angelica Castello, Martin Tetreault, Franz Hautzinger, Hamid Drake, Michael Zerang, Naoto Yamagishi, Phil Minton, Luc Ex, Thomas Lehn, Lê Quan Ninh, Jacques Di Donato, Xavier Charles, Sophie Agnel and EriKm. She is a member of Hiatus, Système Friche, Where is the Sun and Uruk, performing at many festivals in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Russia, Europe and Japan.
She has always been interested in voice and has spent twenty years developing a distinctive, profoundly personal vocal technique. A language that comes before language. A song that sings its roots into both the breath and the shout.
She regularly works with dance and theatre.
She created the music for Celle qui habitait la maison avant moi (The One Who Lived in the House Before Me), by poet Rasha Omran, premiered in Cairo and subsequently presented at the IN festival in Avignon.
Together with comic illustrator Jean Marc Troubs, she created the project Portrait – Chanté, highlighting the intimate relationship between drawing and voice.
In January 2020 she created a project entitled Libelle, adding her graphic material (drawings, photographs and self-portraits) to her work.
Isabelle Duthoit had a residency at Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto (Japan) in 2008, where she studied the singing in Nô theatre, Bunraku recital and iaido. Together with Jacques Di Donato, she co-directed the Fruits de Mhère festival for ten years, and until 2013 taught the clarinet at the Évry conservatory.
Between 2014 and 2019 she gave voice workshops at the Les Quinconces – l’Espal theatre in Le Mans. Together with Franz Hautzinger, she was programmer of the Paysages d’écoute festival at the same theatre. Since 2018, together with Jacques Di Donato and Nicolas Nageotte, she has organised and programmed the Bords de Mhère concert series.
