Twelve dancers around twenty years of age, amateur or professional, facing Raimund Hogue, who speaks to them, watches them, accompanies them; by way of musical counterpoint, voices from the past, those of Jacques Brel, Bette Davis, Léo Ferré and Dean Martin, whose emotion haunts this variation on Stravinsky's “The Rite of Spring”. “Young People, Old Voices” is a minimalist piece, abstract and finely-honed, where formal research is reinforced by an engagement with history, which explores the collective memory, prompted by popular songs. It is also a political engagement which rejects the aesthetically-standardised body, preferring it without artifice. Whether plunged into water or aligned, pressed up against one another, whether allied or divided, the bodies produce their own language, which is up to each member of the audience to interpret.
“The subjects that inspire me are the reality which surrounds me, the age in which I live, my memory of history, people, images, sensations, the power and beauty of music as well as confrontation with the body – which, in my case, does not correspond to conventional ideals of beauty. Seeing bodies on stage which depart from the norm is important – not only from the historical point of view, but also from the perspective of the current trend which tends to reduce the status of mankind to that of artefacts or designer objects.”   

After writing for the German weekly Die Zeit for some years, Raimund Hoghe was Pina Bausch's dramatist at Tanztheatre Wuppertal from 1980 to 1990. In 1989 he began writing his own pieces and, from 1994, took part on stage as an actor in his own works.

Source: Festival d'Automne à Paris

Raimund Hoghe was born in Wuppertal and began his career by writing portraits of outsiders and celebrities for the German weekly newspaper "Die Zeit". These were later compiled in several books. From 1980 - 90 he worked as dramaturge for Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal which also became the subject matter for two more books. Since 1989 he has been working on his own theatre pieces for various dancers and actors. 1992 started his collaboration with the artist Luca Giacomo Schulte, who is till now his artistic collaborator. In 1994 he produced his first solo for himself, "Meinwärts", which together with the subsequent "Chambre séparée" (1997) and "Another Dream" (2000) made up a trilogy on the 20th century.
 Since 2002, Raimund Hoghe works also on group pieces : "Sarah, Vincent et moi" (2002), "Young People, Old Voices" (2002), "Tanzgescchichten" (2003), "Swan Lake,4 Acts" (2005), and the duo "Sacre - The Rite of the Sprin" (2004) with Lorenzo De Brabandere. He went back to the solo form in 2007 with "36, Avenue Georges Mandel" created in Seoul and presented during the Festival d'Avignon. Raimund Hoghe follows his cycle on classical and history of dance pieces with "Boléro Variations" in 2007 ( creation for the Centre Pompidou / Festival d'Automne in Paris) and the solo "L'Après-midi", for the dancer Emmanuel Eggermont, on Claude Debussy "Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un faune" and Gustav Mahler "Lieder" (creation in Festival Montpellier Danse 2008 /Théâtre du Hangar).

Hoghe frequently works for television on projects such as "Der Buckel", his 1997 hour-long self portrait for WDR (West German Radio and Television). His books have been translated into several languages and he has presented his performances all over Europe, as well as in Japan and Australia. He lives in Düsseldorf and has been awarded several prizes including the "Deutscher Produzentenpreis für Choreografie" in 2001, the French Prix de la Critique in 2006 for "Swan Lake, 4 Acts" (in the category "Best Foreign Piece"). Critics from the magazin ballet-tanz awarded him "Dancer of the Year" for 2008.

Source : Raimund Hoghe 's website

More information : raimundhoghe.com