With devices designed by Retouramont, a dance company specializing in aerial techniques, choreographer Mourad Merzouki leaves the ground and plays with gravity. His new production confronts the very much floor-based hip-hop dance with verticality. Dancers dash in the air, they leap, climb and fly, bringing poetry and weightlessness to the vocabulary of hip-hop movement. Merzouki carries on his process of breaking down genre barriers, disrupting our frames of references.
The music for the captivating and magic spectacle was written by Armand Amar – the famous composer and arranger, the author of soundtracks for over 2 dozen films and the holder of the César Award for Best Music.
Mourad Merzouki is one of the most famous European choreographers, who combines in his work a number of hip-hop and break dance techniques with contemporary dance, circus and other art forms. In his previous work “Pixel”, which had great success in Moscow, the performers were dancing in 3D space. In this new work – “Vertikal” Merzouki explores aerial space, combining hip-hop with vertical dance.
Mourad Merzouki is a choreographer, dancer and the artistic director of Käfig company, which he founded in 1996. He is also the director of CCN (National Choreographic Centre) in Créteil and Val-de-Marne since 2009. Since 2013 the center hosts a national hip-hop festival “Kalypso”.