Rachid Ouramdane
Born to Algerian parents, Rachid Ouramdane was a dancer for Hervé Robbe, Odile Duboc and Meg Stuart before he became a choreographer in the 1990s. Having developed, in his youth, a very sharp political conscience, he designs his shows as a path through which he reflects on how we build our identities. His pieces are investigations on the way history, public and media discourse shape each individual's experience. With accuracy and skill, they place the individual conscience on centre stage confronting them with social and economic mechanisms that try to restrain it. The documentary-like approach that runs through Les Morts pudiques, Superstars, Des témoins ordinaires or Surface de réparation however never lapse into a discursive or psychological perspective. A choreographer above all, Rachid Ouramdane is firstly interested in what individuals carry in their body, on the sidelines of any kind of discourses. This requirement is embodied on stage with great sensitivity. Stage design, sound and lighting create obsessive, almost cinematographic, images that are etched in the imagination and durably fixed in memories. At the Festival d'Avignon, he premiered the solo Skull*cult with Christian Rizzo for Vif du sujet in 2002, and presented Loin... and Des témoins ordinaires in 2009.
MF, May, 2011.