Boris Charmatz / Musée de la danse

Boris Charmatz (1973) is a dancer, choreographer and director of the Musée de la danse, the national choreographic centre of Rennes and Brittany. He subjects dance to formal constraints that redefine its field of possibilities. The stage serves as a rough draft with concepts and organic concentrates being thrown in to observe the chemical reactions, intensities and tensions created by their encounter. From Aatt enen tionon (1996) to danse de nuit (2016), he has created a series of pieces that have marked their epoch alongside his work as a performer and improviser (recently with Médéric Collignon, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Tino Sehgal). Associate artist of the 2011 Festival d’Avignon, Boris Charmatz premiered enfant, a piece for 26 children and 9 dancers, at the Cour d’honneur in the Palais des Papes, and offered Une école d’art, a joint Musée de la danse and Festival d’Avignon project. Invited to MoMA (New York) in 2013, he presented Musée de la danse: Three Collective Gestures, a three-part project on view in the museum’s spaces for three weeks. After first being invited in 2012, Boris Charmatz returned to Tate Modern (London) in 2015 with the project If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse? comprising previously unseen versions of the choreographic projects À bras-le-corps, Levée des conflits, manger, Roman Photo, expo zéro and 20 danseurs pour le XXe siècle. Also that year he opened the dance season at the Opéra national de Paris with 20 danseurs pour le XXe siècle and invited 20 dancers from the Ballet to perform solos from the last century in the public spaces of the Palais Garnier. This project was revived in 2016 at Tanzkongress (Hanover) and the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid) with a different cast of dancers for every performance. On one Sunday in May 2015 and 2016, Boris Charmatz presented Fous de danse on the esplanade Charles-de-Gaulle in Rennes, an invitation to experience dance in all its forms and all its practices from midday to midnight. He is currently working on 10000 gestes, a creation for 25 dancers, which will be previewed at the Manchester International Festival (United Kingdom) in July 2017 and will premiere at the Volksbühne (Berlin) on the Tempelhof site in September 2017, where he will be associate artist. He has published several works: Entretenir/à propos d’une danse contemporaine (Centre national de la danse & Les Presses du réel, 2003) co-written with Isabelle Launay, Je suis une école (Éditions Les Prairies Ordinaires, 2009), a work about the adventure that was Bocal, and Emails 2009-2010 (Les Presses du réel & Musée de la danse, 2013) co-written with Jérôme Bel.