Benjamin Millepied thinks massive.

La Ville Dansée, a free open-air dance competition on Saturdays, is the primary large-scale initiative from Millepied's Paris Dance Venture. Ranging from 11 within the morning and ending after midnight, it entails 12 choreographers and 7 commissions; 10 districts in Paris and its outlying suburbs; podcasts, screenings and reside streams.

The Paris Dance Venture, which Millepied shaped final 12 months with Solenne du Haÿs Mascré, shouldn’t be a dance firm, however a corporation that creates instructional packages and accessible performances. La Ville Dansée (“the dancing metropolis”), a part of the Cultural Olympics – a program of inventive occasions across the Olympics – is its largest splash ever, supposed to indicate Paris and its environment not solely as splendid environments for the efficiency, however as locations. with hidden or forgotten tales.

Millepied returned to dwelling in Paris final 12 months after a decade spent principally in Los Angeles. His final Parisian sojourn, 2014-2016, included a quick and controversial tenure as director of the Paris Opera Ballet, which he mentioned supplied some seeds for the concept of ​​La Ville Dansée.

“I ran the best-funded establishment in France, however solely a fraction of society felt invited,” Millepied mentioned in an interview in Paris in Might. “It made me take into consideration how a lot segregation there may be, how individuals can have a really completely different expertise in the identical place. I made a decision to fee works to inform the invisible tales of the town to deliver collectively individuals who would by no means go to the theater , to construct empathy and neighborhood.”

Millepied and du Haÿs Mascré assembled a small core group that unusually included a political theorist, Françoise Vergès, and a sociologist, Fabien Truong, in addition to the playwright Christian Longchamp. Over months of weekly conferences, they talk about and determine websites for dancing – some well-known ones, such because the Eiffel Tower and the Jardin du Luxembourg; others little identified, comparable to an deserted grocery store within the city of Grigny and Saint-Bernard de la Chapelle, a church that was the location of a notable police raid on migrants in 1996.

Millepied studied and chosen the varied group of choreographers. Then got here the logistics of elevating cash, getting permits and coordinating technical groups throughout the town.

“I actually wished to put money into the town as a efficiency area,” mentioned Millepied.

His first inspiration got here from studying an article within the New York Instances about how Haitian debt had financed the Eiffel Tower, and he additionally knew he wished to work within the suburbs that housed migrant and migrant populations.

However “you possibly can't simply present up and placed on a present,” he mentioned. “It’s a must to include some humility and respect, and information.” He met Truong by means of his brother, a sociologist, and contacted Vergès after studying his e-book, “Decolonizing the Museum.” “I wouldn't have labored with out them if I ventured anyplace with artwork initiatives in areas which are too removed from my very own life expertise,” Millepied mentioned.

He selected choreographers that he admired “and felt he had a narrative or a relationship with every web site”, such because the Moroccan choreographer Mohamed Lamqayssi for Grigny, residence of assorted immigrant populations; the Mozambican Idio Chivava for a piece on the roof of the Philharmonie de Paris that focuses on sound; and the Haitian choreographer Kettly Noël, who will carry out a duet with Thierno Thioune close to the Eiffel Tower.

And he requested the American choreographer Madeline Hollander to make a movie on the Stade de France, the massive sports activities stadium in St. Denis within the northern perimeter of Paris, due to “his curiosity and empathy”.

Generally, he mentioned, “there's a lot hidden violence within the stuff you undergo each day.”

“It is a type of writing by means of dance, by means of the physique, making the physique the pen,” mentioned Vergès, a distinguished senior fellow at College School London.

To search out the websites, every group member introduced concepts and historic analysis to the weekly conferences. Vergès steered the bookshop Presence Africaine, based in 1947 within the Fifth Arrondissement, “as a result of it introduced the African continent to Paris, saying: 'We now have a tradition, we’ve got a historical past.'” Sandra Sainte Rose Fanchine, from Guadeloupe, presents. a piece right here primarily based on the parades of New Orleans, with 30 ladies of shade.

Vergès additionally proposed Place Maubert, at one time closely populated by immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. “Ho Chi Minh settled in Paris round 1919, however that’s virtually forgotten,” he mentioned. Emmanuelle Huynh, a French choreographer of Vietnamese origin, will create a piece there.

After the websites have been chosen, Vergès mentioned, the group condensed their concepts concerning the historical past of every web site right into a paragraph for every choreographer. “So it was as much as them how they wished to ship that,” he mentioned.

Placing the day collectively was “extremely difficult,” mentioned Du Haÿs Mascré, a former manufacturing supervisor at La Seine Musicale in Paris. “It concerned 5 completely different municipalities, a number of regional departments, the Ministry of Overseas Affairs, the town of Paris and quite a few cultural establishments and personal companions.” There was additionally, he added, the query of extra safety amid preparations for the Olympics.

The $870,000 funds got here in equal measures from the private and non-private sectors, he mentioned.

“You're truly producing a present at every of the ten websites,” he mentioned. “In all places we’ve got a particular group that has labored with the neighborhood; You may't simply go away, there have to be a steady dialogue.”

A selected web site, the Stade de France, was renovated for the Olympics. However Millepied and Du Hays Mascré gained entry to the roof and requested Hollander to make a movie there, because it was an impractical place for an viewers. “Anxious and excited,” Hollander mentioned, she started to consider the historical past of matches on the stadium – “FIFA, two rugby cups, the 2015 sport when there have been terrorist assaults” in Paris – and to create a timeline of sports activities pictures. from 1998 to the current, taken at events right here.

5 hundred photographs “of those very excessive power moments” turned the rating for the choreography of his ceiling movie. “I've been considering quite a bit about how photographs actually carve out our recollections and tales,” she mentioned.

Different choreographers have delved into the historical past of their websites. Lamqayssi, working in Grigny, was impressed when he discovered that the quarries there supplied stone to construct the Paris metro. “Grigny is marginalized and poor, a middle for immigrants, nevertheless it has contributed to constructing an excellent and exquisite Paris,” he mentioned.

Haitian-born Noël, whose work may have the Eiffel Tower as a backdrop, mentioned the duo he created makes indirect references to Haiti's stolen assets. However principally, he mentioned, “I hope the meanings will emerge from our our bodies.”

The general public present, he added, “is a strategy to democratize dance, make it obtainable. Many individuals suppose that dance is just for an elite – even those that dance in actual life.”

The dancing metropolis

It may be streamed reside at parisdanceproject.org and on the TikTok and Instagram accounts of the Paris Dance Venture.

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