La Danse aux Poings

Mohamed Athamna takes us backstage into Boxe Boxe. Rehearsals, interviews and excerpts from the show interweave throughout this documentary, in order to plunge us into the daily life of the choreographer and to understand his creative process. 

From the age of 5 to 18, alongside martial arts, circus and then hip-hop, choreographer Mourad Merzouki practiced boxing, a school of rigor and discipline which, he says, “helped me a lot as a dancer”. Some 20 years later, he remembers… and to highlight the poetry of the “noble art”, its many similarities with choreographic art, he created Boxe Boxe in September 2010, at the Maison de la danse in Lyon.

Confronting boxing physically again, bringing it on stage with the exclusive help of dancers, using their hip-hop and contemporary vocabulary, taking a light, offbeat look at it and calling on the Debussy Quartet, also present on stage, with music ranging from Verdi and Schubert to Phil Glass, from Gorecki to Glen Miller: these are some of the challenges that Merzouki has set himself for Boxe Boxe. The creation of the piece in Lyon, followed by its performances at the Théâtre national de Chaillot, provided the opportunity to create this portrait and retrace an exemplary journey. For, since his debut in 1994, the founder of the Käfig company, initiator and director of the Pôle Pik centre in Bron, and since June 2009 director of the Centre chorégraphique national de Créteil et du Val-de-Marne, has created around fifteen shows that have toured the world, helping to bring hip-hop dance from the street to the stage.

Myriam Bloedé

“Boxing’s a form of dance anyway. I realized that as a teenager, when I got into hip-hop after years of doing martial arts. While one is identified with brutality and violence and the other with grace and pleasure, I found a touch of all these ingredients in each of them.
I’ll be putting these contrasts to work in this new piece, because each aspect of boxing has an equivalent in choreography: the ring and the stage, the gong and the curtain going up, the referee and the eagle-eyed critics – for me there are all kinds of similarities.
Like martial arts, dance demands hard work, sweat, no effort spared; in both the «performer» commits himself and suffers the same encounter with the void in the form of his opponent or the audience. No weaknesses or flaws allowed – he has to satisfy the public. The further I go down my path as a choreographer, the clearer it is that you really have to show your mettle. When fame and recognition are no longer enough, only risk-taking – the face-off, the leap into the unknown, and ultimately your battle with yourself – will keep you going.So there’s a mix – the excitement of combat and fear of the spectators: the gut fear of getting badly knocked about, of taking a licking, together with that great feeling of abandoning yourself, of achieving absolute fulfillment in that magic moment on stage or in the ring.”

Mourad Merzouki