“I set out to compose an evening programme made up of three musical works choreographed for a large group of dancers. The musical choices were drawn from the period 1975-1976. The American minimalist wave was already being challenged by young composers who used its architecture but confronted it with other ways of thinking and energies. All three musical pieces persistently question the relationship to rhythm through the use of pulsing beats: they are staccato in Andriessen’s work, constantly unstable in Tudor’s and delicately compelling in Brian Eno’s.

Condensing questions of choreographic composition that I have been working on for twenty years now, 3 Works for 12 is a comprehensive piece, a concentrated exercise in writing, and a treatise on compositional, spatial and dynamic effects.

The group of twelve performers is considered as a mass of soloists, each a medium for a score that gives a visible interpretation of the music.

Rhythms, textures, qualities, flow: the performers are vectors of musical parameters. With elementary power, simplicity of means, high-voltage energy and an obsessive relationship to pulsing beats, 3 Works for 12 develops a range of relationships between dance and music open to multiple possibilities: association, partnership, colonisation, authority, and so on.

Louis Andriessen’s description of his piece Hoketus served as a mantra for these three choreographic proposals: to create “gigantic dancing human machines”.

Alban Richard, July 2019

Alban Richard discovered contemporary dance while he was pursuing literary and musical studies. From the late 1990s, he worked for various choreographers such as Odile Duboc, Olga de Soto and Rosalind Crisp.

In 2000, Alban Richard founded Ensemble l'Abrupt for which he created about thirty very different pieces, always in close interaction with a musical work whose writing and formal structure he questioned. Consequently, each creation opens up new research and a new performance style, setting itself apart from the previous one. The way he develops his shows, using restricted improvisations to devise the work directly on stage, encourages the performers to become creators of their own dance.

Alban Richard has collaborated with the Alla francesca ensemble, Les Talens Lyriques, Les Percussions de Strasbourg, the Ensemble intercontemporain, IRCAM and the Cairn, Instant Donné and Alternance ensembles, as well as with composers Arnaud Rebotini, Sebastian Rivas, Erwan Keravec, Jérôme Combier, Laurent Perrier, Raphaël Cendo, Robin Leduc, Paul Clift, Wen Liu and Matthew Barnson.

A prolific choreographer, Alban Richard is regularly invited by ballets and companies, both internationally (Canada, Lithuania, Norway) and in France, to create commissioned works.

Since 2015 he has been artistic director of the centre chorégraphique national de Caen en Normandie, with a project based on both his practice as an author and on connecting with the territory and its inhabitants.

More information : https://ccncn.eu/english/

Having picked up a passion for the audiovisual at an early age from his two brothers, Nicolas Simon quickly developed a love of cinema and began making short films in his teenage years. He studied at the audiovisual ESRA school in Rennes, where he made two 16mm short films. In 2004, he met Emmanuelle Vo-Din, who introduced him to the world of contemporary dance. 

In 2008 he completed Making Rainbow, a documentary retracing the five months over which the first edition of the performance Rainbow was created. He then co-directed Le Grand Éléphant - L’Aventure des Constructeurs, filmed over two years in the workshop of La Machine as they designed and built the Grand Elephant of Île de Nantes: a giant, animatronic elephant. Alongside regular collaborations with several choreographers, including, Alban Richard, Margot Dorléans, Sylvain Riéjou, Daniel Dobbels as well as the companies Le Pôle and PJPP, Nicolas Simon has made several documentaries, including Les Constructeurs d’Éole and Je me souviens.

A place for dance open to everyone, where people come to see, dance and talk.

The centre chorégraphique national de Caen en Normandie is a space of shared projects that questions the world in which we live, a receptive place where dance is at the heart of an artistic, political and civic-minded vision. It is a centre for the creation, hosting, production and dissemination of choreographic works, a hub that acts as a resource for training and research. It is a place shared with artists, residents, associations and cultural institutions, a place open to artistic creation and the contemporary repertoire.

Awakening curiosity, stimulating the desire for knowledge, opening up to differences, sharing real artistic, intellectual and human experiences – these are the challenges identified by Alban Richard for the centre chorégraphique national de Caen en Normandie.