Boris Charmatz

Dancer, choreographer and creator of experimental projects such as the ephemeral school Bocal, the Musée de la danse and Terrain, 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 was the director of the Musée de la danse, Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne. In January 2019, he launched 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 the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse in Lyon, he co-signs his first piece “À bras-le-corps” with Dimitri Chamblas in 1993. It was followed by 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) were included in the ballet repertoire of Opéra de Paris.

Boris Charmatz is the author of several books (“Entretenir”, 2003, co-written with Isabelle Launay; “Je suis une école”, 2009), and is as well a dancer and improviser (among others with Odile Duboc, Médéric Collignon, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Tino Sehgal).

His work has been presented all over the world including retrospectives at MoMA (New York) and Tate Modern (London). In the framework of the portrait dedicated to Boris Charmatz by Festival d’Automne à Paris he created “La Ronde” in 2021 in the big nave of the Grand Palais before its closure for renovation, and “Happening Tempête” for the opening of the Grand Palais Ephémère. That same year he opened 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 became the director of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. Together with Tanztheater Wuppertal and Terrain, he is building a new Franco-German artistic project, intended to develop both his choreographic work and the repertoire of Pina Bausch. In May 2023, he presented “WUNDERTAL”, a series of events in Wuppertal. In September 2023, he presents “Liberté Cathédrale”, his first piece with the ensemble.