Nombrer les étoiles is an immersion into a form specific to the Middle Ages, the ballad, a literary and musical genre of great sensitivity. The danced song, an ancestor of kinds to the pop song, contains several stanzas, a chorus but also plenty soul-searching.

Nombrer les étoiles is an album of nine danced songs.

In Nombrer les étoiles, dance and music are intrinsically linked, with the two mediums developing the same compositional structures.

The movement is composed from the rhythm of the poems, the duration of the foot, the word and the verse.

The bodies of the dancers are the emanation of the moods, colours and emotions of the music.

The songs of troubadours and trouvères, compositions by Guillaume de Machaut and Thibaut de Champagne, are performed and sung live by the medieval music ensemble Alla francesca. A sound design by Félix Perdreau based on these materials and the dancers’ breathing is spatialised on stage and in the audience.

Nombrer les étoiles imagines distant and secret worlds, dreams of a haven of peace, adopting beauty as a leitmotif. Shelters of light are built to mark out uncertain landscapes and provide refuge. Dark transformations take place on this journey into the depths of the soul.

Nombrer les étoiles is a poetic bubble, a moment of escape from the world.

Alban Richard discovered contemporary dance alongside his music and literature studies. As a performer, he went on to work for Odile Duboc, Christine Gaigg, Olga de Soto and Rosalind Crisp among others.

In 2000, he founded Ensemble L’Abrupt and built up a repertoire of some thirty pieces. His writing is process-based, structured by several partitions – for dance, music, light and costumes.

Ensemble L’Abrupt has done residencies at numerous theatres: Théâtre de Vanves, Centre National de la Danse de Pantin, Forum du Blanc-Mesnil, Théâtre Louis Aragon in Tremblay-en-France, Scène nationale d’Orléans, Le Prisme centre for artistic development in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, Théâtre National de Chaillot, Théâtre Paul Eluard (TPE) in Bezons and Théâtre 71, Scène nationale de Malakoff.

Alban Richard has developed numerous collaborations with artists from the music world, including the Alla francesca ensemble, Les Talens Lyriques, Les Percussions de Strasbourg, the Instant Donné and Alternance ensembles, IRCAM, and the composers Laurent Perrier, Raphael Cendo, Jérôme Combier, Robin Leduc, Erwan Keravec and Arnaud Rebotini.

He is also a commissioned artist. In recent years, his installation-performances have been displayed at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, the Louvre, the Quai Branly Museum, the Guimet Museum and the Abu Dhabi Art Fair.

In September 2015, Alban Richard was appointed as artistic director of the Centre chorégraphique national de Caen en Normandie.

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

Initiated to music and cinema by his two older brothers Nicolas Simon quickly becomes a cinephile and begins to direct short films as a teenager.

After a training in audiovisual professions at ESRA Bretagne, where he directed two short films in 16 millimeters, he met Emmanuelle Vo-Dinh in 2004 and discovered contemporary dance. In 2008, he directed « Making Rainbow », which traces the five months of creation of the first edition of the show "Rainbow" in Rennes.

He then co-directed «Le Grand Éléphant - l’Aventure des Constructeurs» an incursion of nearly two years in the premises of the association "The Machine" to follow with its builders the birth of the Grand Elephant Island of Nantes .

While continuing to work regularly with many choreographers like Alban Richard or Daniel Dobbels, he has since made several documentaries, commercials or video clips as well as three seasons of the series « La Tête de l’Emploi » for France 3.

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 new challenges identified by Alban Richard for the centre chorégraphique national de Caen en Normandie.

Associated artists 2016 - 2018: 

Ola Maciejewska and Mélanie Perrier (choreographers)

Companion artists 2016 - 2019: 

Jérôme Combier (composer), Christine Gaigg, Mickaël Phelippeau (choreographers) and Phia Ménard (director)

https://ccncn.eu/english