How about shaking things up? What if we summoned Pachelbel, Bach, Rachmaninov, Schubert and Guadeloupean percussion to recolour hip hop? What if the musicians entered the dance and the dance played with their colours to create an unidentified dancing object?

Meeting was born of an encounter with the virtuoso cellist Claire Oppert. The cello has always fascinated and disturbed me. Because its history is linked to the Ka, the Guadeloupean drum that gave rhythm to my childhood and made the slaves - my ancestors - dance, while the string instruments resonated on the side of the masters. So I wanted to bring them together in an improbable duet spiced up from time to time by an electro sound. Six dancers, a cellist and a percussionist cross their differences for the duration of a meeting. They laugh, they suffer. They provoke each other, they love each other... Gestures tell stories, bodies converse, music responds. I've imagined a piece in the colours of the seasons, the feelings, moods and inclinations of each. An interlude of grace, power and the blending of genres. Because the duty to remember does not exclude resilience or the desire to write the present in a different way. Meeting delights in the differences that end up making up a bouquet.

Jean-Claude Marignale

In Guadeloupe, where he spent his childhood, he swore by football. But when he moved to Paris in the late 1980s, he discovered jazz rock and soul funk, and realised that ‘every moment of (his) life would be dance time’. After years of training in classical, contemporary and jazz dance in Paris and then in New York at the Broadway Dance Theater and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, in 1995 he founded the association Tout En Danse (TED) and the company Jean-Claude Marignale (JCM). The companies Sals'n jazz, Crazy circus, Original Magik Step and JCM Dance Project followed. With an early passion for mixing genres, he set up the Festival des Arènes de la Danse et du Cirque in Nanterre in 2008, building on ten years of discoveries.

For more information: http://www.jeanclaudemarignale.com/