Rachid Ouramdane/Ballet du Grand Théatre de Gèneve

The Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève returns once again to the stage of the Cavea of ​​the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone, with Outsider, the new creation of the choreographer Rachid Ouramdane.

The show, as part of the Romaeuropa Festival, presents twenty-one male and female dancers and four tightrope walkers - including Nathan Paulin, famous for some extraordinary feats, such as crossing the Seine while balancing at a height of 70 meters on a tight cable between the Eiffel Tower and the Théatre Chaillot – for a unique ballet, in the name of lightness, where different disciplines intersect with each other. Outsider focuses on the image of the cloud and the very moment in which the horizontality of the movement is in danger; in this way the limit point that a dancer or athlete can overcome is called into question. Thus emerges a choreography of broken lines, poised and at constant risk of falling, accompanied by the repetitive music of Julius Eastman, a little-known exponent of New York minimalism of the 1970s. The result is a sort of anguished oscillation that guides the collective movements of the dancers: like a cloud that engages with the play of lines that arises from the luminous scenography. The choreographer thus builds his new piece by continuing to work on the potential of the body, on the possibility of questioning the laws of gravity and finding new horizons for movement.

Born in 1971 in Nîmes to Algerian parents, after graduating from the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers, in 1992 he began his career as an interpreter with Emmanuelle Huynh, Odile Duboc, Hervé Robbe, Meg Stuart, Christian Rizzo, Alain Buffard and Julie Nioche with whom he co-directed the company Fin Novembre from 1996 to 2007. In 2007 he founded the company L'A./Ouramdane with which, through a work of collecting testimonies, he attempted to actively contribute to the social debate by investigating the theme of identity and how individual trajectories can cross collective ones. This is how Loin… (2008), Des témoins ordinaires (2009), Sfumato (2012) were born. In 2005 he was 'Associate Artist' at the Bonlieu Scène Nationale d'Annecy and since 2010 at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris. In 2016 he was appointed co-director, with Yoann Bourgeois, of the National Choreographic Center of Grenoble (CCN2). In 2017 he debuted his Les Plaisirs de la découverte with the Ballet de Lorraine.

Photo credits: the Auditorium Parco della Musica official site