The collaborative project with the National Chiang Kai-Shek Cultural Center was born during my first trip to Taiwan where our Company was performing its show Récital. I was captivated by the energy of the dancers that were sharing the stage with us that day. I thus decided to meet with a new culture both imbued with ancestral traditions and rooted in extreme modernity.

Encountering the “Other” is always a source of inspiration for me: whether with Chinese dancers for a piece's transmission project, or with South African or Brazilian performers for a creation. The relationship to the “outsider” is necessarily and inherently different - the language barrier forces us to think differently, and body language therefore prevails over any other form of communication. The modesty and reserve one feels in front of this other are ultimately transcended by a new language: The gestures of bodies shaped and filled with cultures that enrich one another and are intertwined. The language barrier invites me to change my relation to dancers, to music, to space.

The entrenchment I intend to stir up animates my creative process: I'm curious to find the fulcrum between the dance that characterizes me and the dance in Taiwan, as the bodies, the influences and the training inevitably differ from my experience. The cast for this creation features Taiwanese and French performers. I will rely on some close collaborators, but for the first time I will work with a young designer I met in Taiwan. He stands out by creating costumes carved in wool and I have been impressed by his work. The costume as a constraint for the dancer's gesture pushes me to find the rhythm elsewhere. In doing so, I wish to trigger a new relation to movement and to set dance performance into another space.

Mourad Merzouki

A major figure on the hip-hop scene since the early 1990s, Merzouki works at the crossroads of many different disciplines: he adds circus, martial arts, fine arts, video and live music to his exploration of hip-hop dance. Without losing sight of the roots of hip-hop movement – of its social and geographical origins – this multidisciplinary approach opens new horizons and reveals original outlooks. Since 1996, 30 creations have been performed in 700 cities and 65 countries, with more than 3,000 performances given for 1.7 million people. Since 2009, Merzouki is director of the Centre chorégraphique national de Créteil et du Val-de-Marne, where he created the festival Kalypso, a Parisian twin of his festival Karavel in the region of Lyon. In 2016, he is also appointed artistic director of Pôle en Scènes in Bron.

More information : http://ccncreteil.com/

After studies of mathematics preparatory class and medecine studies, Luc Riolon begins to make films within the framework of his Faculty of Medicine, then met the famous choreographers of the 80s (Maguy Marin, Mark Tompkins, Josef Nadj, Daniel Larrieu Daniel, Odile Duboc, Josette Baiz, Angelin Prljocaj, etc.) with whom he shoots numerous films (re-creation for the camera, the illegal securements). In the 80s with the American choreographer Mark Tompkins he introduces the video on the stage, broadcasting live on big screens the images which he shoots with his camera by being on the stage with the dancers, mixing live images and pre-recorded images. With Daniel Larrieu he participates in the creation of the famous show WATERPROOF, the contemporary choreography which takes place in a swimming pool, by filming live) the dancers dancing in the water and mixing the live images with pre-recorded underwater images. This choreography has been shown in many countries (USA, Canada, Spain, England…)
Then he collaborates during 10 years with the famous french TV producer Eve Ruggieri for her programs" Musics in the heart ". He shoots with her of numerous documentaries about classical music, opera singers and dance. From 1999 he directs documentaries of scientific popularization, by following researchers attached to the resolution of a particular ecologic enigma. These two artistic and scientific domains which can seem separated are nevertheless, for Luc Riolon, connected by the same approach : the deep desire to understand the world, by the art or by the scientific research, and to restore it to the largest number. Among his recent scientific documentaries, we can quote for example " The Enigma of the Black Caiman ", Living and dying in the swamp " or " The Nile delta: The end of the miracle ". “Chernobyl, a natural history ? “ These documentaries of scientific popularization recently have been awarded in international festivals.

Source: Vimeo

 In June 2009, Mourad Merzouki was appointed director of the CCN de   Créteil and Val-de-Marne (National Choreography Centre), where he has   developed his vision of dance as “an open window on the world”. Since   the creation of the Käfig Company in 1996, the choreographer has been able to expand the language of hip-hop by working at where multiple   disciplines intersect: circus, martial arts, contemporary dance and   more. His pieces are currently touring the world. Supported by the State and local authorities, the Centres chorégraphiques nationaux (CCN) promote the development of dance, both through the creative impulse of their directors-choreographers, but also by supporting choreographic artists of various styles, by presenting works and by raising public awareness of the art of dance.

Today there are 19 Centres chorégraphiques nationaux. The CCN de Créteil is one of the first to have been created, by Maguy Marin. Three of them are now run by hip-hop choreographers, in Créteil (Mourad Merzouki), La Rochelle (Kader Attou) and Rennes (FAIR-E collective).

Mourad Merzouki has been at the head of the Centre chorégraphique national de Créteil et du Val-de-Marne / Compagnie Käfig since 2009. He is developing an artistic project that is both open to the world and rooted in the territory, transcending aesthetic, cultural and social boundaries. Tours, workshops, residencies, the Kalypso festival : there are many opportunities to discover and celebrate hip-hop dance, an art form that has become, in over 30 years, a strong marker of the cultural identity of our heritage.