Biography
Born in 1973 in Chambéry, France, Boris Charmatz is a dancer and choreographer but also a creator of experimental projects. He studied dance at the Opéra National de Paris and the national music and dance conservatoire (CNSMD) in Lyon. From 2009 to 2018, Charmatz headed the National Choreography Centre (CCN) of Rennes and Brittany, where he set up the Musée de la Danse, an experimental space for thinking about, and turning upside-down, the established relationship between audiences, art and its physical and imaginative realms. In January 2019, he launched terrain, an entity based in the Hauts-de-France region and associated with Le Phénix, a scène nationale in Valenciennes, with the Opéra de Lille and with the Maison de la Culture in Amiens. He has created a series of landmark pieces, from À bras-le-corps (1993) to Somnole (2021); others include Aatt enen tionon (1996); enfant (2011), for 26 children and nine dancers, created for the Cour d’Honneur at the Avignon Festival, and 10000 gestes (2017). He is also a performer and improviser, particularly with and for Odile Duboc, Médéric Collignon, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Tino Sehgal. After a maiden invitation in 2012, Boris Charmatz returned in 2015 to Tate Modern, London, with the project If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse ? That same year, he curtain-raised the dance season at the Opéra National de Paris with 20 danseurs pour le XXe siècle, inviting 20 of the Ballet’s dancers to perform 20th-century solos in the Palais Garnier’s public spaces. In 2015, he proposed to the city of Rennes Fous de danse, an invitation to experience dance in all its forms between noon and midnight; the event was held twice more in Rennes and also in Brest, Berlin and Paris. Boris Charmatz was an associate artist of the Volksbühne in the 2017-2018 season. He received artist support from Charleroi Danse in 2018-2022. In 2021, the Grand Palais invited him to stage the opening of the Grand Palais Éphémère, for which he orchestrated Happening Tempête, a performance for 130 dancers. In July that year, he opened the Manchester International Festival with Sea Change, a dance piece with 150 amateur and professional dancers. In September 2022, he became the director of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch to develop a new Franco-German project called [terrain], a new project between Germany and France.