Rachid Ouramdane

Choreographer

Рашид Урамдан

After his degree at the National Centre for Contemporary Dance of Angers, Rachid Ouramdane begins a choreographer and performer career and works in France and abroad with Meg Stuart, Emmanuelle Huynh, Odile Duboc, Christian Rizzo, Hervé Robbe, Catherine Contour, Jeremy Nelson and Alain Buffard. In 1996, he creates the « Fin novembre » company with Julie Nioche, and establishes later his own company in 2007: L’A.

His plays often distinguish themselves by using video devices to explore the intimate sphere. They also testify a specific approach: the uniqueness of an encounter is considered as a decisive factor in every of his plays. That’s why trips are inspiring the creations. After Discreet Deaths (2004), a solo based on the representations of death on the Internet, Rachid Ouramdane goes to the eastern part of Brazil to create Cover (2005) with three artists he met there. For Far… (2008), an autobiographical solo, he goes to ex-Indochina looking for his own family history, then returns to Brazil to prepare Ordinary Witnesses (2009), a choreography based on the testimony of people victims of torture. In 2012, he travels to China to meet climate refugees and creates based on their testimonies the piece Sfumato, a fantasmatic vision of the question of territories disappearance. A new experience of exile and a poetry of memories. POLICES ! (2013), on the text of Sonia Chiambretto and a music of Jean-Baptiste Julien, constitute a poetical question mark about the notions of justice and law applications.

2014 is a turning point for his choreographic research. He creates Tout autour / All around for 24 dancers for the Ballet of Opéra de Lyon, a piece based on accumulations as principles of writing. He continues to explore that kind of process in his next creation in 2015. In the meantime, he proposes TORDRE, a duet for the dancers Lora Juodkaite and Annie Hanauer, as a sensitive portrait of these two womens.

If he travels a lot, Rachid Ouramdane also favours long period of establishment in the same territory. All the residences his work has taken place since the beginning of his career testify this : he is associated to the Manège of Reims from 2000 to 2004, to the Ménagerie de Verre in Paris from 2005 to 2007, to the Théâtre 2 Gennevilliers from 2007 to 2010. Now, he is still in residency in Bonlieu, Scène nationale in Annecy since 2005 and in the Théâtre de la Ville of Paris since 2010.

He alsogives high priority to many collaborations: Superstars (2006) created for the Ballet of the Opera of Lyon; Borscheviks… a true story…(2010), for the dancers of the russian company Migrazia during a residence in Siberia for the Intradance project (Russia); and Looking back (2011), for the 20 years birthday of Candoco Dance Company (United Kingdom) with disabled dancers.

His many sided work, that melts multimedia devices and creation of lights and sounds to the choreography, leads him to collaborate with plastic artists (Nicolas Floch, Mehdi Meddaci…), to imagine visual work of art apart from his plays (a video triptych inspired from Ordinary Witnesses), or to collaborate with multidis- ciplinary structures (the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Soirées Nomades of the Fondation Cartier, the FRAC of Champagne/Ardennes). Rachid Ouramdane’s approach distinguishes itself also because it blurs the frontiers between crea- tion and transmission. Like in his play Surface de reparation, created in 2007 with athletic teenagers from the town Gennevilliers, after a very long time of immersion in their everyday life.

Apart from his artistic project that connects dance to documentary since the creation of L’A company, Rachid Ouramdane puts a lot of himself in an international activity of transmission and encounter (workshop, conferences, researches) in France, Romania, Netherlands, Brazil, United States…