«The  misleadingly sketched-in vocabulary I have been developing for several  years for my work is based on an accumulation of choreographic themes  knit together at very high speed, creating a kind of dancing which is  hard to take in visually and which is therefore a metaphor for life  itself. The dancing reveals the uniqueness of each person onstage and  highlights how we each need to deal on a daily basis in order to find  where we stand relative to others. This dance concentrate invents a  heightened, tight environment in which the relationship between the  individual and the group is constantly changing. Declaring one’s  uniqueness and having the courage to own one’s differences seems to me  to be essential in this time when we are scared by the Other, when he or  she is unfairly stigmatized.

The crisis into which I place these bodies reveals the dancers’  ability to react on a stage where everything is constantly accelerating.  We see a collective intelligence emerging from these protagonists,  bringing solutions to ‘extreme’ situations or moments of chaos, when the  collective only brings us saturation and blockages.

The spontaneity of the dancers’ movements toward each other creates a  sort of concentrate of humanity in which we glimpse fleeting bits of  choreographic themes. It is this material which I try to grasp to invent  my dance, where a shape appears only to be erased and immediately  replaced by another shape, so fast that you are not sure you actually  saw it happen.

The musical work of Jean-Baptiste Julien reinforces this sensation of  overflow and acceleration barrelling through the dancers, creating a  world crisis. Once again I will be trying working through a heterogenous  abundance of actions – to reflect what I believe to the logic of our  social cohesion, our ability to copy with all these differences.» Rachid Ouramdane

Source : Ballet de Lorraine

At the age of twelve, Rachid Ouramdane discovered dance  through hip-hop. He also took intensive courses in classical and modern  dance. In the early 1990s, he dropped out of his studies in biology to  devote himself fulltime to dance and joined the Centre national de danse  contemporaine in Angers.

As a performer and choreographer, he has  worked with Meg Stuart, Odile Duboc, Hervé Robbe, Alain Buffard,  Christian Rizzo, Julie Nioche and Emmanuelle Huynh.

Rachid  Ouramdane's creations are often marked by the seal of testimony and  intimate experience (refugee children, victims of torture or natural  disasters, amateur athletes, etc.) from which he weaves a structured  choreography.

Rachid Ouramdane collaborates with circus artists  (Compagnie XY), authors (Pascal Rambert, Sonia Chiambretto), visual  artists (Nicolas Floch' and Mehdi Meddaci), and musicians (Jean-Baptiste  Julien and Alexandre Meyer) for his own creations as well as for  commissioned works and workshops.

With an ambitious project based  on diversity and hospitality, he has been director of Chaillot - Théâtre  national de la Danse in Paris since April 2021.

Source: Chaillot - Théâtre national de la Danse

More information: https://theatre-chaillot.fr/en

Bérangère Goossens is a french filmmaker, born in 1979. She studied cinema at university of Paris 8 and started directing documentaries.

Since acquiring the CCN title in 1999, the Centre Chorégraphique National - Ballet de Lorraine has dedicated itself to supporting contemporary choreographic creation. As of July 2011 the organization is under the general and artistic direction of Petter Jacobsson.
The CCN – Ballet de Lorraine and its company of 26 dancers is one of the most important companies working in Europe, performing contemporary creations while retaining and programming a rich and extensive repertory, spanning our modern history, made up of works by some of our generations most highly regarded choreographers.
The CCN functions as an art center and venue for multiple possibilities in the fields of research, experimentation and artistic creation. It is a platform open to many different disciplines, a space where the many visions of dance of today may meet. 

More information : http://ballet-de-lorraine.eu