Every year since 2009, Holland Dance Festival has been organizing Talent On The Move, introducing you to the vibrant young dance talent of Codarts Rotterdam, the international hotspot for contemporary dance. In this eighteenth edition of the festival, a very special program takes place: the Codarts dancers share the stage with students from the prestigious Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris. A wonderful opportunity for the young dancers from both cities to broaden their horizons.
Important dance heritage
The joint performances during the festival - and those in May 2022 at the Centre National de la Danse in Paris - are the culmination of a more extensive exchange project, for which Holland Dance Festival was able to obtain the support of DANCE ON, PASS ON, DREAM ON (DoPoDo), a European subsidy fund that, in addition to supporting projects for older dancers, also stimulates the transfer of important dance heritage. The young dance talents of Codarts and the Paris Conservatory will work throughout 2021/2022 on creations by various top choreographers, each with a connection to either the Netherlands or France.
In this festival, the French students will present "Suite for five" by Merce Cunningham. In addition, the French dance Hearts and Arrows by their compatriot Benjamin Millepied, known for his creations for the New York City Ballet, the Ballet de l'Opera National de Paris (of which he was also artistic director for a short time) and the Hollywood film Black Swan, among others.
The Codarts dancers can be seen in Bravo Charlie by Marco Goecke, in a part from Wings of Wax by Jiři Kylián and in Femme by Belgian choreographer Jens van Daele, who died unexpectedly in 2020. In addition, dancers from both cities will also present a jointly performed choreography from Kylián's Whereabouts Unknown, which will soon feature all female students from both programs.
Cradle of ballet
Cédric Andrieux, head of the dance department at the Paris Conservatoire: "This collaboration is a wonderful opportunity for our students to broaden their horizons, to realize that there is a great deal to do in the field of dance outside France. We have selected first-year students from our still fairly new master's program for this project. This is largely separate from the bachelor's program at our conservatory, which has a purely classical focus. In the master's program we want to educate students more broadly, lift the division, as it were, so that modern dance students will also be able to dance Forsythe and the classically trained can also dance Trisha Brown. In that respect, I think Codarts is well ahead of us. Paris may be the birthplace of ballet, but in terms of diversity and certainly multiculturalism, we can still learn a lot from you."
