Boris Charmatz
Dancer, choreographer and creator of experimental projects Boris Charmatz finds dance in unusual places. Concerned to link his questions with the state of contemporary bodies, he conceives performances and hybrid formats for very different sites and spaces and that relate to repertoire and creation, theory and transmission. From 2009 to 2018 Boris Charmatz is the director of the Musée de la danse, Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne. In January 2019 he launches Terrain, his new structure based in the Region Hauts-de-France, a project for choreographic experimentation without walls and roof, imbedded in the city and the public space.
Educated first at the Ballet School of the Opéra national de Paris and then at CNSMD de danse in Lyon, he co-signs his first piece À bras-le-corps with Dimitri Chamblas in 1993. Follow a series of seminal works, among them Aatt enen tionon (1996), enfant (2011), created for the Avignon Festival’s Cour d’Honneur, 10000 gestes (2017) and SOMNOLE (2021). À bras-le-corps and 20 dancers for the XX century (2012) enter the ballet repertoire of Opéra de Paris. Boris Charmatz is the author of several books and is as well a dancer and improviser (among others with Odile Duboc, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Tino Sehgal). His work has been presented all over the world including retrospectives at MoMA (New York), at Festival d`Automne (Paris) and Tate Modern (London).
In the framework of the portrait dedicated to Boris Charmatz by Festival d’Automne à Paris he creates La Ronde in 2021 in the big Nave of the Grand Palais before the closure for renovation, and Happening Tempête for the opening of the Grand Palais Ephémère. That same year he opens the Manchester International Festival with Sea Change, a choreographic work for a street in the city with 150 amateur and professional performers.
In August 2022 Boris Charmatz becomes the director of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. Together with Tanztheater Wuppertal and Terrain he builds a new artistic project among Germany and France, dedicated to jointly develop his choreographic work and the repertoire of Pina Bausch.
In September 2023 he created Liberté Cathédrale, his first piece with the ensemble, which was declared one of the highlights of the 2023/24 season and named “Production of the Year” in the annual critics’ survey of the dance magazine Tanz. In 2024, he was an associate artist of the 78th Avignon Festival and, together with the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch and his French structure Terrain, presented CERCLES and Liberté Cathédrale on Île de la Barthelasse, as well as Forever (Immersion dans Café Müller de Pina Bausch) at La FabricA.