Mohamed Athamna takes us backstage into Boxe Boxe. Rehearsals, interviews and excerpts from the show interweave throughout this documentary, in order to plunge us into the daily life of the choreographer and to understand his creative process. 

From the age of 5 to 18, alongside martial arts, circus and then hip-hop, choreographer Mourad Merzouki practiced boxing, a school of rigor and discipline which, he says, "helped me a lot as a dancer". Some 20 years later, he remembers... and to highlight the poetry of the "noble art", its many similarities with choreographic art, he created Boxe Boxe in September 2010, at the Maison de la danse in Lyon.

Confronting boxing physically again, bringing it on stage with the exclusive help of dancers, using their hip-hop and contemporary vocabulary, taking a light, offbeat look at it and calling on the Debussy Quartet, also present on stage, with music ranging from Verdi and Schubert to Phil Glass, from Gorecki to Glen Miller: these are some of the challenges that Merzouki has set himself for Boxe Boxe. The creation of the piece in Lyon, followed by its performances at the Théâtre national de Chaillot, provided the opportunity to create this portrait and retrace an exemplary journey. For, since his debut in 1994, the founder of the Käfig company, initiator and director of the Pôle Pik centre in Bron, and since June 2009 director of the Centre chorégraphique national de Créteil et du Val-de-Marne, has created around fifteen shows that have toured the world, helping to bring hip-hop dance from the street to the stage.

Myriam Bloedé

"Boxing's a form of dance anyway. I realized that as a teenager, when I got into hip-hop after years of doing martial arts. While one is identified with brutality and violence and the other with grace and pleasure, I found a touch of all these ingredients in each of them.
I'll be putting these contrasts to work in this new piece, because each aspect of boxing has an equivalent in choreography: the ring and the stage, the gong and the curtain going up, the referee and the eagle-eyed critics – for me there are all kinds of similarities.
Like martial arts, dance demands hard work, sweat, no effort spared; in both the «performer» commits himself and suffers the same encounter with the void in the form of his opponent or the audience. No weaknesses or flaws allowed – he has to satisfy the public. The further I go down my path as a choreographer, the clearer it is that you really have to show your mettle. When fame and recognition are no longer enough, only risk-taking – the face-off, the leap into the unknown, and ultimately your battle with yourself – will keep you going.So there's a mix – the excitement of combat and fear of the spectators: the gut fear of getting badly knocked about, of taking a licking, together with that great feeling of abandoning yourself, of achieving absolute fulfillment in that magic moment on stage or in the ring."

Mourad Merzouki

A major figure on the hip-hop scene since the early 1990s, Merzouki works at the crossroads of many different disciplines: he adds circus, martial arts, fine arts, video and live music to his exploration of hip-hop dance. Without losing sight of the roots of hip-hop movement – of its social and geographical origins – this multidisciplinary approach opens new horizons and reveals original outlooks. Since 1996, 30 creations have been performed in 700 cities and 65 countries, with more than 3,000 performances given for 1.7 million people. Since 2009, Merzouki is director of the Centre chorégraphique national de Créteil et du Val-de-Marne, where he created the festival Kalypso, a Parisian twin of his festival Karavel in the region of Lyon. In 2016, he is also appointed artistic director of Pôle en Scènes in Bron.

More information : http://ccncreteil.com/

Christophe Collette and Marc Vieillefon, violin - Vincent Deprecq, viola - Cédric Conchon, cello

Through its passionate commitment to speak in a unique voice, eschewing the creation of an international quartet sound, the Debussy String Quartet has established its reputation as one of the finest quartets touring and recording today. Formed in 1990 by a group of young musicians studying at the Conservatoire de Lyon, France, the quartet has gained international renown for its exciting performances and award-winning recordings. In major concert halls from New York to Tokyo they perform a wide range of works, and are perhaps most well known for their devotion to the French repertoire. The quartet’s performances of the Ravel, Debussy and Fauré quartets are legendary, and these four musicians continue to create new audiences for works of their countrymen such as Lalo, Lekeu, Milhaud and the late romantic composer Ermand Bonnal.

Winners of the Evian International String Quartet Competition, the Debussy String Quartet performs about 80 concerts a year in Europe, Asia, and North America. They are regular guests at distinguished concert halls (Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Auditorio Nacional de Musica in Madrid, Grand Theatre in Geneva, Konzerthaus in Berlin, Théâtre du Châtelet, Musée du Louvre in Paris) and are also heard at many of Europe’s finest festivals.

In addition to mixed chamber music with renowned colleagues, the quartet has embarked on an adventurous collaboration with the famed modern dance ensemble, Compagnie Käfig (choreographer Mourad Merzouki), for a project in which they are incorporated as choreographed elements while performing on their respective instruments in concert with the dancers: Boxe Boxe ; following the success of this show, they have created Boxe Boxe Brasil…

The Debussy String Quartet is based in Lyon, France. Its members are the founders of “Les Cordes en ballade” a chamber music festival and an academy of chamber music in the South of France, where they perform and teach each summer.

The Debussy String Quartet’s extensive discography includes the acclaimed Decca label release of the landmark Mozart Requiem recording, in the 1802 transcription by Peter Lichtenthal (about which a documentary film has also been made). The Arion label produced several volumes in the “French Music” collection (Bonnal, Ravel, Fauré, Witkowski, Lekeu) and the complete Shostakovich Quartets, among other works. The quartet’s mixed chamber music repertoire includes its highly regarded CD of the Brahms and Weber clarinet quintets with clarinetist Jean Francois Verdier and a highly acclaimed collaboration with the pianist François Chaplin in several Mozart piano concertos. In addition, their discography includes the complete works of Webern for string quartet (for Harmonia Mundi), which received the coveted « Choc » award of Le Monde de la Musique.

Recently, the Debussy String Quartet recorded the Opus show’s soundtrack and the jazz album, Filigrane (for Radio France), Marc Mellits’s quartets and the Boxe Boxe Brasil show’s soundtrack. Their last records of Claude Debussy’s preludes was released in 2018 for the centenarian of the death of the famous French composer.

 In June 2009, Mourad Merzouki was appointed director of the CCN de   Créteil and Val-de-Marne (National Choreography Centre), where he has   developed his vision of dance as “an open window on the world”. Since   the creation of the Käfig Company in 1996, the choreographer has been able to expand the language of hip-hop by working at where multiple   disciplines intersect: circus, martial arts, contemporary dance and   more. His pieces are currently touring the world. Supported by the State and local authorities, the Centres chorégraphiques nationaux (CCN) promote the development of dance, both through the creative impulse of their directors-choreographers, but also by supporting choreographic artists of various styles, by presenting works and by raising public awareness of the art of dance.

Today there are 19 Centres chorégraphiques nationaux. The CCN de Créteil is one of the first to have been created, by Maguy Marin. Three of them are now run by hip-hop choreographers, in Créteil (Mourad Merzouki), La Rochelle (Kader Attou) and Rennes (FAIR-E collective).

Mourad Merzouki has been at the head of the Centre chorégraphique national de Créteil et du Val-de-Marne / Compagnie Käfig since 2009. He is developing an artistic project that is both open to the world and rooted in the territory, transcending aesthetic, cultural and social boundaries. Tours, workshops, residencies, the Kalypso festival : there are many opportunities to discover and celebrate hip-hop dance, an art form that has become, in over 30 years, a strong marker of the cultural identity of our heritage.