Roselyne Bachelot-Narquin, in agreement with Alain Rousset, President of the Regional Council of Nouvelle Aquitaine, Jean-François Fountaine, Mayor of La Rochelle, Olivier Debray, President of the Centre chorégraphique, gives its approval to the appointment of Olivia Grandville as director of the Centre chorégraphique national de La Rochelle, on the unanimous proposal of the jury meeting on June 10, 2021 and after validation by the Board of Directors on June 14, 2021.
Olivia Grandville received a classical training at the Paris Opera School of Dance. She joined the ballet from 1981 to 1988, when she decided to resign to devote herself to contemporary dance. She joined the company of Dominique Bagouet in 1989 and participated in all of his plays until his death in 1992. Since 1996, Olivia Grandville has developed her personal work and has created in particular The Discrediting Cabaret, Five Ryoanji, Crowds (a work for a hundred amateurs), The Battle of Carnival and Lent, To the West, Days of Anger, We will overcome the curses, The War of the Poor. In late 2021, she will create Débandade, a room for 7 young men. His last years were also marked by commissions for various companies such as the CCN Ballet national de Marseille or the CCN Ballet de Lorraine and the development of Dance-Park at the Lieu Unique in Nantes, where his company has been based since 2011.
Entitled «Mille Plateaux», Olivia Grandville’s project aims to make the Centre chorégraphique national de la Rochelle a real house of choreographic culture, a house of all dances, based on the rich history of this structure, which has been marked by innovation and reinvention since its inception. Olivia Grandville wants to develop a project of a National Choreographic Centre open to the ecological, societal, generational and cultural transition so that it becomes a real «Theatre of Transdisciplinary and transcultural choreographic Operation».
It aims at a National Choreographic Centre within a dynamic of both aesthetic and territorial mobility, proposing in particular to develop a «Mobile Unit of Artistic Actions» which will give the possibility to multiply formats and modes of address to the audiences, and thus to propose the dance where it sometimes struggles to access.
Olivia Grandville proposes to build the future of the Centre chorégraphique national de La Rochelle by putting at the heart of the «Mille Plateaux» that she will develop, «art as experience»: an open, nomadic, innovative and inclusive art.
Olivia Grandville will take up her duties on 1er january 2022. The Minister wishes to greet Kader Attou, current director and first choreographer of hip hop aesthetics to take the direction of a National Choreographic Centre in 2008.