extract from 33min20 to 36min10

Composed by Iannis Xenakis, Pléiades was originally a commission from the City of Strasbourg in 1979 for the Percussions de Strasbourg and the Ballet du Rhin. Having now become a key reference in contemporary music, the work has been performed in concert all over the world, however losing its choreographic vocation along the way. Alban Richard wished to revive this original link with dance by creating a “music and dance concert” that brings together six dancers and six percussionists on stage.

Conceived as a danced concert, each musical section gives rise to a specific spatialisation of percussion on stage, reconfiguring the space of dancers and musicians towards a progressive fusion between music and dance.

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/

Avec plus de 1 600 concerts dans le monde entier et 300 créations  depuis leur fondation en 1962, les Percussions de Strasbourg sont à  l’origine de tout un pan du répertoire contemporain pour percussion.  Faire vivre un patrimoine en le revisitant sans cesse, innover sans  relâche au rythme de l’évolution des nouvelles technologies et de  l’élargissement des pratiques et expressions scéniques : tels sont les  défis à relever pour inventer et explorer l’immensité du champ de la  percussion au XXIe siècle.

Sous l’impulsion de son nouveau directeur artistique Jean Geoffroy  (depuis 2015), l’ensemble continue à diversifier ses projets. Il  n’hésite pas à se mettre en scène avec de nouveaux artistes, créateurs,  interprètes ou circassiens, venus de différents horizons musicaux.
Les Percussions de Strasbourg entendent bien poursuivre cette aventure  unique et prolonger ainsi le pont entre le répertoire « historique » et  les nouveaux espaces artistiques. Des chemins de traverse qui restent à  découvrir, investir et partager.

www.percussionsdestrasbourg.com

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
 

https://ccncn.eu/evenement/pleiades/