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Madhavi’s command over the nritta or purely ornamental aspect of Odissi is striking. Her delicate postures and strong rhythmic footwork combine in an appealing flow of sculpturesque movements. Her subtle abhinaya (the expressional aspect of dance), musical knowledge and aesthetic sense add to the highly distinctive character of her recitals.

Through teaching, performing and conducting workshops, Madhavi has been actively involved in propagating the art of Odissi in New Delhi and other parts of India as well as the world. She has trained a number of accomplished students who are performers in their own right. In nineteen eighty five she organized a seminar and festival, Angahaar, a first of its kind event in New Delhi when gurus, scholars and dancers met to revisit the origins of Odissi and think about the future trends of the dance form. She also directed and produced a short audio-visual documentary that was screened at the festival.

Madhavi’s father, the late Professor Vinay Chandra Maudgalya was the founder of the famous Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, New Delhi’s first and most highly reputed institution for the teaching of Hindustani music and classical dance. Madhavi has been teaching Odissi at this institute for many years.

She has received repeated acclaim in the major cities and dance festivals that have featured her throughout the world : like the Edinburgh International Festival, U.K. ; Festival of India in USA ; the Cervantino Festival, Mexico ; Vienna Dance Festival, Austria ; Festival of Indian Dance, South Africa ; Festival of Indian Culture, Sao Paulo, Brazil ; Days of Indian Culture, Hungary ; Festival of Indian Arts, London ; the Avignon Festival, France ; Pina Bausch’s Festival, Wuppertal and Berlin Festpiele, Germany ; and festivals in Italy, Spain, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Japan and the Indian subcontinent.
She has been associated with the making of several films and audio-visuals on Odissi as well as with the organisation of some of the most widely appreciated specialised dance festivals in India.

Source : Per Diem & Co

More information

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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/

Born in Centralia, Washington on April 16, 1919, Cunningham began his  career as a modern dancer at the age of 20, dancing for six years with  the Martha Graham Dance Company. He presented his first recital in 1944,  and formed the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1953. The company was a  living canvas for his experimentation and the creation of his unusual  pieces.
 Over his long career he  choregraphed more than 150 pieces and more than 800 Events. Many dancers  studied and worked with Cunningham before founding their own companies,  among them Paul Taylor, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs and Karole  Armitage ... He collaborated with many artists; his collaboration with  John Cage had the most influence on his practice.
 Together Cunningham and Cage  proposed a series of radical innovations in dance. The most famous and  controversial of these dealt with the relationship between dance and  music, able to co-exist in the same space and time but needing to be  conceived independently of each other.
 Cunningham continued to  experiment and innovate throughout his life, and he was one of the first  to use new technologies in his own art form. He choreographed and  taught almost until the day he died, July 26, 2009, and received many  awards and accolades. Cunningham’s life and work have inspired the  publication of four books and three important exhibitions; several of  his pieces have been presented by other prestigious companies such as  American Ballet Theatre, the Ballet de Lorraine, the New York City  Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet, the Rambert Dance Company in London and  the White Oak Dance Project.

Source: CCN-Ballet de Lorraine

More information: www.mercecunningham.org

In 1980, after studying dance at Mudra School in Brussels and Tisch School of the Arts in New York, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (b. 1960) created Asch, her first choreographic work. Two years later came the premiere of Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich. De Keersmaeker established the dance company Rosas in Brussels in 1983, while creating the work Rosas danst Rosas. Since these breakthrough pieces, her choreography has been grounded in a rigorous and prolific exploration of the relationship between dance and music. She has created with Rosas a wide-ranging body of work engaging the musical structures and scores of several periods, from early music to contemporary and popular idioms. Her choreographic practice also draws formal principles from geometry, numerical patterns, the natural world, and social structures to offer a unique perspective on the body’s articulation in space and time.

From 1992 until 2007, Rosas was in residence in the Brussels opera house De Munt/La Monnaie. During this period, De Keersmaeker directed a number of operas and large ensemble pieces that have since been performed by repertoire companies worldwide. In Drumming (1998) and Rain (2001), both with Ictus contemporary music ensemble, complex geometric structures in point and counterpoint, together with the minimal motivic music of Steve Reich, created compelling group choreographies that remain iconic and definitive of Rosas as a dance company. Also during her time at La Monnaie, De Keersmaeker created Toccata (1993) to fugues and sonatas of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose music has continued to be a recurring thread in her work. Verklärte Nacht (both the 1995 version for fourteen dancers and the 2014 version for three) unfolded De Keersmaeker’s expressionist side, bringing the stormy narrative of Arnold Schönberg’s late romantic string sextet to life. She ventured into theater, text, and interdisciplinary performance with I said I (1999), In real time (2000), Kassandra - speaking in twelve voices (2004), and D’un soir un jour (2006). She highlighted the use of improvisation within choreography in tandem with jazz and Indian music in such pieces as Bitches Brew / Tacoma Narrows (2003, to the music of Miles Davis), and Raga for the Rainy Season / A Love Supreme (2005).

In 1995 De Keersmaeker established the school P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios) in Brussels in association with De Munt/La Monnaie.

De Keersmaeker’s latest pieces mark a visible "stripping down" of her choreography to essential principles: spatial constraints of geometric pattern; bodily parameters of movement generation, from the utmost simplicity of walking to the fullest complexity of dancing; and close adherence to a score (musical or otherwise) for the choreographic writing. In 2013, De Keersmaeker returned to the music of Bach (performed live) in Partita 2, a duet between herself and Boris Charmatz. Also in 2013, she created Vortex Temporum to the spectral music piece of the same name written in 1996 by Gérard Grisey. Taking her penchant for writing movements from musical scores to an extreme level of sophistication, "Vortex Temporum" had a one-to-one ratio between the Rosas dancers and the live Ictus musicians, bringing the choreography and the music into meticulous dialogue. In 2015 this piece was adapted to a durational exhibition format at WIELS in Brussels under the title Work/Travail/Arbeid. Also in 2015, Rosas premiered "Golden Hours" (« As you like it »), using for the first time a body of text (« Shakespeare’s As You Like It ») as the score for movement, thus allowing the music (Brian Eno’s 1975 album Another Green World) to recede from strict framework to soft environment. Later that year, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker continued her research into the relationship between text and movement in Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke, a creation based on the eponymous text by Rainer Maria Rilke. At the beginning of 2017 she was invited by the Paris Opera to direct Mozart’s Così fan tutte.

In A Choreographer’s Score, a three-volume monograph published by Rosas and Mercatorfonds, De Keersmaeker offers the performance theorist and musicologist Bojana Cvejić wide-ranging insights into the making of four early works.

Source: The company Rosas 's website

More information : rosas.be