Catherine Diverrès has said, “Conscience, our relationship with others, this is what creates time”, ever since her first choreographic creation. She is a sort of strange meteor, appearing in the landscape of contemporary dance in the mid-80’s. She stood out almost immediately in her rejection of the tenets of post-modern American dance and the classically-based vocabularies trending at that time. She trained at the Mudra School in Brussels under the direction of Maurice Béjart, and studied the techniques of José Limón, Merce Cunningham and Alwin Nikolais before joining the company of Dominique Bagouet in Montpellier, then deciding to set out on her own choreographic journey.

Her first work was an iconic duo, Instance, with Bernardo Montet, based upon a study trip she took to Japan in 1983, during which she worked with one of the great masters of butoh, Kazuo Ohno. This marked the beginning of the Studio DM. Ten years later she was appointed director of the National Choreographic Center in Rennes, which she directed until 2008.

Over the years, Catherine Diverrès has created over thirty pieces, created her own dance language, an extreme and powerful dance, resonating with the great changes in life, entering into dialogues with the poets: Rilke, Pasolini and Holderlin, reflecting alongside the philosophers Wladimir Jankelevich and Jean-Luc Nancy, focusing also on the transmission of movement and repertoire in Echos, Stances and Solides and destabilising her own dancing with the help of the plastician Anish Kapoor in L’ombre du ciel.

Beginning in 2000, she began adapting her own style of dance by conceiving other structures for her creations: she improvised with the music in Blowin, developed projects based on experiences abroad, in Sicily for Cantieri, and with Spanish artists in La maison du sourd. Exploring the quality of stage presence, gravity, hallucinated images, suspensions, falls and flight — the choreographer began using her own dance as a means of revealing, revelation, unmasking, for example in Encor, in which movements and historical periods are presented. Diverrès works with the body to explore the important social and aesthetic changes of today, or to examine memory, the way she did in her recent solo in homage to Kazuo Ohno, O Sensei.

And now the cycle is repeating, opening on a new period of creation with the founding of Diverrès’ new company, Association d’Octobre, and the implantation of the company in the city of Vannes in Brittany. Continuing on her chosen path of creation and transmission, the choreographer and her dancers have taken on a legendary figure, Penthesilea, the queen of the Amazons, in Penthésilée(s). In returning to group and collective work, this new work is indeed another step forward in the choreographer’s continuing artistic journey.

Source: Irène Filiberti, website of the company Catherine Diverrès

More information: compagnie-catherine-diverres.com

Claude Brumachon was born in 1959, in Rouen. After attending Fine Arts where drawing directed him down the path of bodies, he took up dance at the age of seventeen with « les Ballets de la Cité » led by Catherine Atlani, he stayed there for two years.

In 1981, Claude Brumachon met Benjamin Lamarche in Paris, they immediately started a collaborative and original research. Together, they explored that new world opening up through the dancing body.

Claude Brumachon between 1980 and 1983, as for him, worked with Christine Gérard (La Pierre Fugitive), Karine Saporta and Brigitte Farges.

As they belonged to no school in particular and as they rejected none, Claude and Benjamin sealed their agreement with a first duet : Niverolles Duo du col in 1982.

With their first group, the « Rixes » company in 1984, they invented a stylized, vehement and passionate choreographic writing: a sharp and brisk gesture, a tormented tenderness. They surrounded themselves with dancers, a composer, a makeup artist and a costume designer: Founding a troupe and leading it to creation.

In four years’ time, the choreographer created ten plays with two major ones (1988): Texane (award-winning at the Bagnolet contest) and Le Piédestal des vierges which set their style to a recognizable gesture. It quickly followed on sequences of cleat-cut and sharp movements cutting the body and the space.

The choreographer carved out a reputation. In 1989, Folie came to the fore and was a great success again. That success has been repeated 7 years later in 1996, with Icare (presented at the 50th Festival d’Avignon), a solo written for Benjamin Lamarche.

Sometimes groping, sometimes rushing headlong, Claude Brumachon and Benjamin Lamarche imagine and create new worlds. There‘s never any doubt between them, doubts are about dancing, about the ways of dancing, about the continuing questioning of this moving body the mind is obsessed with.

The teaching of their dance is made through training, lessons are made as much to pass on this brand new knowledge as to refine it. Moments to unite the group under a common body language. To understand is also to make understand.

As an expression of desire – passionate – and of an overflowing sensuality to a certain point that it was sometimes described as violent, their plays are tales of the inexpressible, they are mirrors of raging inner worlds, pushed beyond their own rules. Claude Brumachon and Benjamin Lamarche have become researchers in poetic and powerful movements. They’ve been creating a dance alternately full of energy and tormented, lyric and passionate, now high-spirited and romantic and now down to earth and meaningful.

Out of Molière’s wanderings, they made with Histoire d’Argan le Visionnaire (2007) a bright and facetious show as a tribute to the artist. Out of the consumer society, they made a Festin (2004), carnal and sensual where proximity bursts out at the face of the audience. With Phobos (2007), they ventured into irrational, universal or shallow fears.

Claude and Benjamin create from the body for the body and with the body.

Their dances are as much stories of different groups that share a space to live in as they are stories of loneliness facing the world. They all are a research around an irrational gesture that calls for the precise one, necessary and full of meaning.

A gesture, heavy with an unspeakable story that changes into the very moment and, in a sometimes bitter statement, offers a view of man in his complexity.

Claude Brumachon signed more than eighty original choreographies with his own dancers, dancers from other French or foreign ballets, with schools and with children as well.

They directed the National Choreographic Centre of Nantes to the creation in 1992 to 2015. Since January 1, 2016 they continue their choreographic road with their new company SOUS LA PEAU.

Source : Brumachon-Lamarche

More information :

https://www.brumachon-lamarche.fr/

In his early pieces (name given by the author, Jérôme Bel, Shirtology…), Jérôme Bel applied structuralist operations to dance in order to single out the primary elements from theatrical spectacle. The neutralization of  formal criteria and the distance he took from choreographic language led him to reduce his pieces to their operative minimum, the better to bring out a critical reading of the economy of the stage, and of the body on it.

His interest subsequently shifted from dance as a stage practice to the issue of the performer as a particular individual. The series of portraits of dancers (Véronique Doisneau, Cédric Andrieux, Isadora Duncan…) broaches dance through the narrative of those who practice it, emphasizes words in a dance spectacle, and stresses the issue of the singularity of the stage. Here, formal and institutional criticism takes the form of a deconstruction through discourse, in a subversive gesture which radicalizes its relation to choreography.

Through his use of biography, Jérôme  Bel politicizes his questions, aware as he is of the crisis involving the subject in contemporary society and the forms its representation takes on stage. In embryonic form in The show must go on, he deals with questions about what the theatre can be in a political sense—questions which come to the fore from Disabled Theater and Gala on. In offering the stage to non-traditional performers (amateurs, people with physical and mental handicaps, children…), he shows a preference for the community of differences over the formatted group, and a desire to dance over choreography, and duly applies the methods of a process of emancipation through art.

Since 2019, for ecological reasons, Jérôme Bel and his company no longer use airplanes for their travels and it is with this new paradigm that his latest performances (Xiao Ke, Laura Pante...) have been created and produced.

He has been invited to contemporary art biennials and museums (Tate Modern, MoMA, Documenta 13, the Louvre…), where he has put on performances and shown films. Two of them, Véronique Doisneau and Shirtology, are in the collections of the Musée National d’Art Moderne-Centre Pompidou. Jérôme Bel  is regularly invited to give lectures at universities (Waseda, UCLA, Stanford…). In 2013, together with the choreographer Boris Charmatz, he co-authored Emails 2009-2010, which was published by Les Presses du Réel.

In 2005, Jérôme Bel received a Bessie Award for the performances of The show must go on given in New York. Three years later, with Pichet Klunchun, he won the Routes Princesse Margriet Award for Cultural Diversity (European Cultural Foundation) for the  performance  Pichet Klunchun and myself. Disabled Theater was chosen in 2013 for the Theatertreffen in Berlin and won the Swiss “present-day dance creation” prize. En 2021, Jérôme Bel and Wu-Kang Chen received the Taishin Performing Arts Award for the performance Dances for Wu-Kang Chen.

Source : Jérôme Bel 's website

More information : jeromebel.fr

Born on January 3rd 1973, in Chambéry, France

Dancer, choreographer, and director of  Terrain, Boris Charmatz subjects dance to formal constraints which  redraw the field of possibilities. The stage is a notepad where to draft  concentrated, organic concepts in order to observe the chemical  reactions, intensities, and tensions engendered by their encounter.

During 2009 - 2018 he is the director of Musée de la danse / Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne.
He is the author of a series of landmark shows, from Aatt enen tionon (1996) to 10000 gestes  (2017), in addition to his activity as a performer and improviser (in  collaboration with Médéric Collignon, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, and  Tino Sehgal).
As an associate artist of the 2011 edition of the Avignon Theatre Festival, Boris Charmatz created enfant.  Performed at the Cour d’Honneur at the Palais des Papes, the piece  involved 26 children and 9 adult dancers. It was restaged at the  Volksbühne in 2018 with a group of Berlin children. Invited to the MoMA  in 2013, Boris Charmatz staged Musée de la danse: Three Collective Gestures,  a three-part program performed at the museum over the course of three  weeks. Following an invitation in 2012, Boris Charmatz was once again  hosted by Tate Modern in London in 2015, where he presented If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse? The show included alternate versions of the choreographic projects À bras-le-corps; Levée des conflits; manger; Roman Photo; expo zéro; and 20 Dancers for the XX Century. That same year, Boris Charmatz opened the dance season at the National Opera in Paris with 20 Dancers for the XX Century,  and invited 20 dancers from the Ballet to perform twentieth-century  solo parts in public spaces at the Palais Garnier. In May 2015 he  premieres Fous de danse, an invitation to live dance in all its  forms from noon until midnight. Further editions of this choreographic  assembly bringing together professional dancers and amateurs, take place  in Rennes in 2016 and 2018; Brest, Berlin and Paris (Festival  d’Automne) follow in 2017.
During 2017-2018 Boris Charmatz is associate artiste of Volksbühne Berlin where he presents danse de nuit  (2016), 10000 gestes (2017), A Dancer’s Day  (2017) and enfant (2018).

End of 2018 Boris Charmatz leaves Musée de la danse / Centre  chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne and for the occasion  creates La Ruée at Théâtre National de Bretagne, a collective performance inspired by the book Histoire mondiale de la France,  written under the direction of Patrick Boucheron.
In January 2019 he launches Terrain, association established in the  Region Hauts-de-France and in partnership with the phénix, scène  nationale of Valenciennes, Opéra de Lille and Maison de la Culture  d’Amiens. Boris Charmatz is also associate artist of Charleroi danse  (Belgium) for three years (2018-2021).
In the summer of 2019 Zürcher Theater Spektakel gives Boris Charmatz carte blanche to take over the festival site on the lake. terrain | Boris Charmatz : Un essai à ciel ouvert. Ein Tanzgrund für Zürich   becomes the first test of his project Terrain : a green choreographic  site without roof and walls, an architecture of bodies during three  weeks, every day and under the open sky, including public warm-ups,  workshops for children, amateur and professional dancers, performances  and a symposium.
In 2020, the Festival d’Automne à Paris proposes the Portrait Boris Charmatz with works from his repertoire and new projects : La Ruée  (2018), (sans titre)  (2000) by Tino Sehgal, La Fabrique (2020), Aatt enen tionon (1996), 20 danseurs pour le XXe siècle et plus encore  (2012, 2020), boléro 2 (1996) & étrangler le temps (2009) and 10000 gestes (2017). In this framework he creates La Ronde   for the closing event of Grand Palais, collective performance of 12  hours and subject of a film and a documentary for France Télévisions.
In June 21, he orchestrates the groupe performance Happening Tempête for the opening of Grand Palais Éphémère. In July, he opens the Manchester International Festival with Sea Change,  a dance piece with 150 amateurs and professional dancers. In November  he creates and interprets the entirely whistled solo SOMNOLE.
In September 2022, Boris Charmatz will be the new director of  Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, to launch, with Terrain, a new  project between France and Germany. Since August 2022, Boris Charmatz is  the new director of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, to launch, with  Terrain, a new project between France and Germany. In September 2023, he  creates with Tanztheater Wuppertal Ensemble his new piece Liberté Cathédrale.

Charmatz is the author of several books, including Entretenir: à propos d’une danse contemporaine (Centre national de la danse / Les presses du reel, 2003), co-authored with Isabelle Launay; “Je suis une école” (Editions les Prairies Ordinaires, 2009), a work that retraces the adventure with Bocal; and Emails 2009–2010  (Les presses du réel, in partnership with the Musée de danse, 2013),  co-authored with Jérôme Bel. In 2017, MoMa New York as part of its  series Modern Dance, publishes the monography Boris Charmatz,  directed by Janevski and with contributions by Gilles Amalvi, Bojana  Cvejić, Tim Etchells, Adrian Heathfield, Catherine Wood...
His projects initiate various cinematographic realisations, among them Les Disparates  (2000), directed by César Vayssié ; Horace-Bénédict (2001), by Dimitri Chamblas et Aldo Lee ; Une lente introduction (2007) by Boris Charmatz et Aldo Lee ; Levée (2014) by Boris Charmatz et César Vayssié ; Daytime Movements (2016), by Boris Charmatz et Aernout Mik ; TANZGRUND (2021), by César Vayssié ; étrangler le temps (2021) by Boris Charmatz and Aldo Lee.

Source and more information: https://www.borischarmatz.org/