Centre Chorégraphique National de Créteil et du Val-de-Marne | EMKA

Creating, bringing people together, sharing

Drawing on his personal history and background, Mehdi Kerkouche wants the CCN to be a space without borders, like dance itself, a horizon open to all diversities without restriction of gender and connected to all narratives and plural identities. This state of mind, at the heart of his commitment, will create the conditions for a committed and inclusive project. Mehdi Kerkouche is leading a project of openness for the CCN de Créteil et du Val-de-Marne| EMKA, affirming choreography as a universal language and proposing a CCN open to all dances and all styles.

His project includes setting up a digital creation studio based on his conviction: ‘When properly balanced, physical creation and digital creation can only respond to each other, complementing each other and enabling the acquisition of an ever larger and new audience’. In particular, it wishes to draw on the experience it has gained from the event it created, On danse chez vous, to bring together a large and diverse audience around dance, both through its future creations and through the many proposals for the area in which the CCN is based, which it wishes to strengthen. It intends to direct its studio support towards providing better support for companies, particularly in terms of dissemination, including through digital arts residencies to encourage wider circulation of works. Finally, it wishes to make the CCN de Créteil et du Val-de-Marne | EMKA ‘a reference centre for Greater Paris, which at the same time respects the history of its urban territory, both in Paris and beyond the ring road, in direct collaboration with all the CCN’s partner structures in the field of choreography and beyond’.

*The CCN has been directed by Maguy Marin (1985-1998), José Montalvo-Dominique Hervieu (1998-2009) and Mourad Merzouki (2009-2022).