Rachid Ouramdane: “Defending a theater of aesthetic diversity”

In what state of mind do you approach your appointment?

Rachid Ouramdane:The provocation, the confrontation, all that does not interest me. It keeps us away from each other. What matters to me is otherness, to create curiosity, gathering, exchange in all the complexity of French diversity. Invent ways to grasp this complexity. This is all that I would like to bring to Chaillot. The place is obviously loaded with symbol. The building housed the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The place is marked by a history of popular and egalitarian theater for all. Chaillot is the only national dance theater and it seems to me that, as such, it must bring together all the strata of French society. It is about contributing to a theater that offers artistic gestures, aesthetic manifestations.

The Élysée told our colleagues of the World that your project is “anchored in social issues” and falls under “a precise moment in the history of Chaillot and of our country”. How? ‘Or’ What ?

We are at a complicated moment in our history, with the test of various crises: health, social, societal also with demonstrations raising the question of discrimination. In addition, there is a migratory crisis and, sometimes also, identity folds are emerging. This rallying word is part of the desire to defend a theater of aesthetic diversity, of recognition of all gender, cultural and social communities in their contribution to artistic creation. I also defend a European theater. I have been fortunate to travel a lot and to have lived abroad. I find this French-style multiculturalism in our society. Show that our community is made up of these differences rather than thinking of us as fragmented.

If your appointment was welcomed, a regret was noted that it took place without a call for candidates, but by “a reflection led by the DGCA (General Directorate of Artistic Creation)” and that a woman was not named. What do you think ?

This is an appointment by decree, usual for national theaters. I know that several artists have been able to submit projects. There was therefore a comparative approach between several proposals. Regarding the issue of equality, indeed, I think it is important to maintain a concern for parity in cultural institutions. In the project that I am leading, nine associated artists are accompanying me, including five women. We will have to be exemplary on this subject and I intend to continue to be exemplary at Chaillot, which already had this policy, in particular through the salary scale.

Among these nine associated artists is Kery James. How are you going to work with him?

I intend to make a place for music in future programming. And then there is the artist himself, which Kery James defends through his texts. A house like Chaillot can rely on personalities from song and music, because there are choreographic trends that are closely linked to musical cultures. I could have invited someone from the hip-hop world, but I preferred to make room for someone who comes from the song. Kery James has an artistic and scenic production. He has film projects. It is this diversity in him that, in my opinion, can build works that will bring other audiences.

I would like Chaillot to offer shows that are not only for those who are initiated, who have the codes. I want to blur the lines between popular and elitism. My predecessors had also driven this line. It is about being faithful to a heritage of cultural democratization and this is a point on which we must not lower our guard. It is about getting as many people as possible interested in art and culture, therefore knowing how to be in tune with the populations, knowing how to invent devices which know how to respond to the habits and rhythms of life of the populations. Digital technology, for example, is disrupting the way we understand art. Institutions like Chaillot must always rethink themselves, question the diverse and the popular.

How and why do you become a dancer? You don’t choose an art for no reason …

The question of choice came after I started dancing. There was not a moment when I said to myself “I want to be a dancer”. It was first of all a pleasure to move, to dance. I discovered dance when hip-hop arrived in Europe in the 1980s and I just loved dancing. There was also a way of practicing a street dance, claiming and rooted in working-class neighborhoods. This is how I discovered the pleasure of dancing. It was for me a practice before being an art of representation. Little by little, I discovered other types of dances that I practiced, in parallel with more classic studies in biology. As a student, I accompanied friends who auditioned for an important choreographic school, the CNDC d’Angers. I was held back, while telling myself that these were experiences, that I could always go back to my studies. Once this school was over, I never left this dance world.

But there was this desire among you to include this pleasure of doing in an academic training …

There may have been a bit of unconsciousness on my part at the time. I was just carried by the pleasure of doing things, of meeting artists. This report to professionalization came very late. One day I realized that I was what is called a “professional dance”. Basically, in my career, a double thing has built me: the school of art on one side and the school of life on the other. I have always looked for the possibility of expressing myself. I grew up in a context where there was what I learned in the school of the Republic, on the one hand, and family stories on the other, sometimes on the same events in history. Very young, I became deeply aware that faced with the same reality, there are always different points of view. It is this multiplicity that I have always wanted to share, because it has built me ​​as an artist, as much as dance. If, afterwards, I wanted to practice an urban dance, called “street dance”, it is not for nothing. There was a notion of commitment there. It is all this which, in a fairly organic way, organized my course in dance and pushed me to want to expose myself to the eyes of others, to speak afterwards.

What were these family stories and how did the dance fit into them?

I am part of a generation whose parents were refugees, who had to fend for themselves, who did not master the environment in which they lived. A poor social environment, with a foreign language to master. We grow up, we go to school, we learn to read and write there, to understand the codes of the host culture very quickly, to empower ourselves. Very quickly, I was independent, with very caring parents, whose only concern was that their children had access to things to which they had not had access. From there, the relationship to dance was not questioned or a pretext for conflict. Becoming an artist was not a subject for them. It is the chance that I had to benefit from this confidence in a family context where I was seen happy, free in what I undertook. There was nothing special about this choice to dance. It was on the same level as being a mechanic or a lawyer. It was simply responding to aspirations.

My father was a soldier when Algeria was colonized; he had fought in the war of 39-45, that of Indochina. He was also transferred to Germany after the defeat. At the time of the Algerian war, he withdrew from his military engagements. This story of violence is something that haunted my family a lot. I learned quite late that my father had been exposed to acts of torture. When you are a college student, you learn historical things, and, at home, you realize that this had also been the reality for his family. This story has also built my choreographic art. If today I am interested in people who are outside the world of art, if I invite them to share their words and their world, it is to try to contribute to subjectivities that come to join a multiplicity and complexity. of points of view. I say that we must invent the ways to apprehend the diversity which constitutes us and that passes by the experiment. Producing choreographic works that rub shoulders with topical subjects, which combine testimonials from people, is part of this process. Whether unaccompanied migrant minors, as in the play Get through the night, whether with extreme sportsmen or teenagers from the suburbs, these are sensitive materials that lead us to understand the point of view of others.

If the body is political, is the moving body therefore eminently political?

The representation of each body indicates a state of society. I even think that there is choreography far beyond dance. I come back, for example, from the Gorges du Verdon where I filmed extreme tightrope walkers. What they produce in these wild spaces carries a choreographic dimension. Just like working with isolated children who, on stage, at first, hold themselves bent then end up standing up. All this says a state of society and it is in this precise place that the choreography interests me.

Your previous creations reflect a desire to ignore borders and limits rather than blur them. Why ?

You have to know how to ignore the limits to make everything more alive. It is important to allow yourself the opportunity to explore as far as possible. Of course, we have to rely on know-how, whether in the art of dance, choreography, the art of the stage. But I remain convinced that the art of dance advances through its ability to interact with the world at large, by rubbing shoulders with reality. This is why I like to accompany artists in the field who are part of broad aesthetic diversity. You have to know how to do things differently, always overflowing with the art world. Caring about interacting with the world through art is the guarantee of an art that moves us forward and informs us. For example, I created a play based on testimonies from people who have been victims of torture around the world. A witness historian told me that what helped him overcome his traumatic experience was frequenting the words of those who had known how to say what he had experienced, especially literary works. Art interacts in a much broader way than through the simple aesthetic question. I am convinced of this.