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On 17th June 1980, the first Maison de la Danse in France was opened in Lyon, with Guy Darmet as its director. An ardent champion of dance, he established an original and innovative management policy: the promotion of all forms of dance, without any stylistic hierarchy or boundaries, from contemporary cutting-edge creations to the most popular shows, with high standards as the sole criteria.
Since the outset, Maison de la Danse took an interest in video and the task of recording all the shows began, led by Charles Picq, currently the video development manager. In 1990, he set up a dedicated dance video library with free access for the general public, the first of its kind in France. This stock, constantly enriched by the addition of new acquisitions and the production of new archives, now contains over a thousand items. After thirty years of existence, raising the curtain ten thousand times, welcoming audiences totalling over two million, playing host to the greatest dancers and discovering artists who are now internationally famous, Maison de la Danse now has sixteen thousand subscribers and caters for total audiences of over one hundred and eighty thousand each season. It intends to continue its development, without losing sight of its original brief to allow as many people as possible to discover and enjoy dance.
A venue for performance, creation… but also for memory, Maison de la Danse has become a benchmark in terms of communicating dance through film. Conscious of tomorrow’s needs and the possibilities that future technologies might offer, Maison de la Danse is working on the digital conversion of its video archive with a threefold objective: to conserve, facilitate and manage the widest possible access. Now, its numeridanse.tv project is a bold next step.
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