Bernardo Montet

Bernardo Montet is currently an associate artist with the SEcW project in Morlaix and artist-in-residence at the Théâtre Louis Aragon in Tremblay-en-France. He was director of the Centre Chorégraphique National de Tours from 2003 to the end of 2011.

After a period spent at Maurice Béjart’s Mudra school in Brussels, he pursued his career with the choreographer Catherine Diverrès, and was joint director with her of the Centre Chorégraphique National de Rennes until 1998. From 1997 onwards, Bernardo Montet gathered around himself a team of loyal collaborators: Tal Beit Halachmi, Taoufiq Izeddiou, Dimitri Tsiapkinis and Marc Veh, with whom he composed a repertoire of some twenty works. Since Pain de Singe, a founding solo devised together with the filmmaker Téo Hernandez (1987), he has signed such works as, in 1997 Issê Timossé (with the complicity of Pierre Guyotat, author and reciter), in 1998 Beau Travail (in collaboration with Claire Denis), in 2001 Racine’s Bérénice (co-written with Frédéric Fisbach), and O.More (with Gnawa musicians) in 2002.

In Tours, he created nine pieces: Parcours 2C (vobiscum) (with the plastic artist Gilles Touyard) in 2004, Coupédécalé with Eran Tzur for the musical composition (2005), Les batraciens s’en vont (2006) and Batracien, l’après-midi (2007), two works produced together with Lorella Abenavoli for the electroacoustic creation, Apertae (2008), Switch me off (co-written with Thomas Ferrand, 2009), God needs sacrifice (2010), Isao, a solo written for and in collaboration with the Malagasy choreographer Gaby Saranouffi, and Des Hommes, a group work in collaboration with the historian and critic Geneviève Vincent in December 2011.

In July 2011, he was made an Officier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

In 2012, Bernardo Montet accompanied Madeleine Louarn for the show Les Oiseaux (from Aristophanes’ Birds), while at the same time working on a duo entitled (Des)incarnat(s), with one of the actors of the Atelier Catalyse, on the notion of Vulnerable.

All his pieces, buoyed up by demand and radicality, deal with subjects dear to his heart: colonialism, memory, identity, consciousness of the body, resistance, to name but a few. Each choreography springs up from the previous one to weave an image that is both similar and different: the bodies, in their poetical and political dimension, replay the world surrounding us.

Bernardo Montet also develops unusual projects with children, such as ChOral (2013), Mom’arts (2011 and 2014), and in the urban space with Pas à Pas (2013), La Marche des Anges (2007), and Veiller par le geste (2008, 2010).