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PORTRAITS

Ils sont artiste, cheffe étoilée, designer ou apiculteur, pilote automobile ou créatrice de mode. Leur point commun ? Ces personnalités glamour ou au cœur de la vie culturelle, économique et sociale régionale sont les moteurs de l’actualité azuréenne. Découvrez sans filtre le témoignage de leur parcours, leurs rêves, leurs ambitions et leurs projets à venir.

January 2015

Rachid Ouramdane

  • Accepting fragility
 
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1962: End of Algerian war of independence. This historic event is central to my story.
1990: I discover William Forsythe’s work through Limb’s Theorem.
2005: I create my first solo, Les morts pudiques, about the construction of identity.


I am a choreographer and a dancer. I like to say it’s from laziness, even though I’m always on the go from theatre to theatre, town to town, dance centre to dance centre, country to country. I was born in Nîmes in 1971 and started dancing at the age of 12, rather by chance, when I discovered hip-hop. I always connected hip-hop with a social dimension. The idea grew and I gradually found the body in movement to be the best channel for expressing myself. So much so that in 1992 I dropped out of university to take the competitive entrance exam to the contemporary dance school in Angers. After that, one decisive meeting led to another. Among the great contemporary dance names I met in France or abroad are Meg Stuart, Emmanuelle Huynh, Odile Duboc, Christian Rizzo, Hervé Robbe, Catherine Contour, Jeremy Nelson, Alain Buffard and Julie Nioche, with whom I founded the Fin Novembre association. I have been creating choreographies as a member of the L’A. company since 2007, and I’ve been associate dancer with the Bonlieu theatre in Annecy since 2005 and with the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris since 2010.

Identity is central to my life
Strange as it may seem, it all began in 1962, nine years before I was born, when my parents left Algeria to settle in France. A deep, unspoken wound in the family that I was able to fully express in 2005 with my first solo, Les morts pudiques, and then with Loin, in 2008, another autobiographical solo for which I went to Vietnam in the footsteps of my father, a colonised Algerian sent under the French flag to what was then Indochina. The question of identity is central to my life and my work even today; I think it always will be. Whence my constant search for witness accounts and archive documents, hunted out by writers and documentary makers, which I use in almost all my shows. My creations are fragmented between dance, installation and multimedia tool. Tordre, my latest, is on tour at the moment. It was staged at the Théâtre Merlan in Marseille in December last year as part of the Dansem festival. Two very stripped-down solos, but this time with no witness accounts or historical archives. Lora Juodkaite and Annie Hanauer, the dancers, appear fragile and sensitive in movements unadorned but nourished by their life trajectories. The essence.

 


By Louis Badie

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