Montpellier Danse

A quarter century of dance at home with the world

The Montpellier Dance Festival, which began in July 1981, was born of a double will. On one hand, that of Georges Frêche, the new mayor of a city that he was vigorously shaking up to become the metropolis that shines forth today. On the other, that of Dominique Bagouet, who had recently moved to the city, to create a Choreography Centre to match the no less vigorous decentralization of choreographic activity spurred on by the public authorities.
Montpellier Danse originates entirely from this double principle: the event is tied to the effervescent New Dance movement (with its extended forms), yet remains steadfastly true to a political project. This required some astuteness, at the end of the 90s, in order to resist the assaults of a regional presidency in the Languedoc-Roussillon that had made a pact with the extreme right. And it had direct implications when the mayor of Montpellier called on Jean-Paul Montanari, director of the festival, to join his cabinet for several years.
The latter had come to Montpellier with Dominique Bagouet, who quickly entrusted him with directing the new festival. Jean-Paul Montanari has since forged the model of an event of truly international scale, whose artistic acuity has been known to attract over a thousand performers, journalists and professionals some years, whilst remaining firmly rooted in cultural development at the heart of the local population. The latter continue to represent four fifths of the public audience.

Deep-rooted development

Since 1996, Montpellier Danse has scheduled both a winter season and the summer festival, with highly coherent programming, and a total of 50,000 paid entries (half or more of which are for the festival). This figure is to be compared with the size of the city (230,000 inhabitants) with 400,000 when the surrounding villages are included. Since 2007, Montpellier Danse has had its own designated theatre: the Chai du Terral in Saint-Jean-de-Védas. This facility completes that of the headquarters of the team in Agora, the international dance centre, shared with the national Choreographic Centre directed by Mathilde Monnier, in the Ursulines convent, right in the heart of the old town.
The festival and the season’s events also take place in a dozen other halls. The Jacques Coeur courtyard was for many years emblematic of the fervour of summer festivals in the south, before It was taken over for the extension of the Musée Fabre art museum. By then, thanks to its perfect technical facilities and economic ratio, the Berlioz hall in the Corum had become the ideal venue, symbolising the true coming of age of the event. Nevertheless, performances are still regularly held in the communes surrounding Montpellier and in the squares of the city. Maurice Béjart gave a free performance of his pas de deux before six thousand people (1994), and Merce Cunningham events were performed in front of two thousand (1995). Young companies also vie for these stages. At the turn of the 90s, when tension in the high-rise neighbourhoods was already smouldering, Montpellier Danse invested up to a third of its artistic budget in establishing creative hip-hop among the young people of these neighbourhoods. A large number of contemporary dance companies work throughout the year in Montpellier. The Montpellier Danse Festival and season feature as part of their context, by favouring several of these companies each year through co-production or programming their events.

Rendez-vous for new dance

Jointly programmed by Dominique Bagouet and Jean-Paul Montanari, the editions of Montpellier Danse in the 80s initially responded to the need to raise awareness among a wider public of the multiple forms of an art that hitherto had been seen by very few. We were «working so that dance would no longer be just a branch of music, or a dance department.» So Montpellier presented classical dance – which represented Dominique Bagouet’s own background, and which he continued to appreciate in many respects – alongside neo-classical or even traditional dance and from all countries. In 1982, Trisha Brown began a quest establishing the references of the grand masters of American modernity. Merce Cunningham took up this quest in 1985. This gave rise to countless venues and triumphs, including some unique proposals for Montpellier. These include the presentation of Ocean, in 1998, before an audience of 4000 in the Zenith concert hall whose interior had been entirely refurbished. In 1995, these two New-Yorkers, joined by Bill T Jones, admitted their surprise, saying «We live a few streets away from one another all year, yet we have to come to Montpellier to get the chance to really meet and work on ideas together.»
The 80s witnessed a dazzling development in Montpellier Danse: 16 companies from 10 countries programmed in 1985, with 200 performers presenting 20 shows, 8 of which were creations, in 60 performances. Since then, 25 companies on average are hosted for each edition. The number of companies programmed to date is an estimated 600. The contemporary dance movement from around the world meets up in Montpellier every summer to discover all the important new creations. Major creations by Diverrès and Montet, Chopinot, Larrieu, Decouflé, Bouvier-Obadia, Marin, etc, are presented, almost systematically, alongside those of Dominique Bagouet, and later, Mathilde Monnier. In 1988, Régine Chopinot, Jean-Claude Gallotta, Maguy Marin and Dominique Bagouet drafted a joint declaration that attracted much attention, on the state of their art. Highly internationally renowned companies and choreographers regularly perform here (Batsheva and Ohad Naharin, Nederland Dans Theater and Jiri Kylian, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, William Forsythe, Sankaï Juku, Sasha Waltz, Jan Fabre, Saburo Teshigawara, etc).

A festival for research

Montpellier Danse has given support to quests, initiated changes and questioned aesthetic trends in the choreographic movement. In the 80s, as a counterpoint to the contemporary option, we saw François Raffinot and Francine Lancelot propagate a new baroque aesthetic (inviting Nureyev to dance to Bach…). The notion of «new interpretation» (1991) can be cited here. The same year offered a vision of hip-hop that had infiltrated into the working-class neighbourhoods of Montpellier, interspersed with the latest input from New York. The same current was brought to the fore in 2004, having reached its full aesthetic maturity. 1996 saw a revival of the living memory of post-modern dance (Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, 1996). At the end of the 90s, via a partnership with the AFAA (French association of artistic action), attention was largely focused on new choreographers from Black Africa and other emerging countries. The 2006 programme turned the projector toward modern work from the southern coast of the Mediterranean. At the start of 2000, the numbering system for each edition was put back to zero (Montpellier Danse 01, Montpellier Danse 02, etc). These years saw the development of a sustained interest in aesthetic renewal looking at new ways of interpreting the body and deconstructing spectacular performance, in consultation with Laurent Goumarre. The early works of Jérôme Bel, Boris Charmatz, Emmanuelle Huynh, etc, were systematically aired. Raimund Hoghe’s name became intimately linked with that of the festival. These years saw the SACD (Society for authors and composers in the performing arts) set up its Vif du sujet programme of events in Montpellier. Furthermore, for better or for worse, Montpellier Danse was the first festival to be cancelled in the summer of 2003, during the summer of action by the media industry workers on short-term contracts.

A festival in debate

In 1989, Jean-Paul Montanari opened the festival dressed in an Act-Up t-shirt and braces printed with a Cyrillic text (this was the height of perestroïka). « I want to shake up the little world of dance and its ghetto; I want to get the world into it. The world that hurts me, the world that delights me, the world that overwhelms me», he said. He gave a very personal note to the editions of the following decade (Dominique Bagouet died in 1992, from AIDS). These were the years of a festival described by journalists as «an Avignon of dance.» The main issues of the time were debated, numerous films and exhibitions were shown; writers, philosophers and dramatists were invited. Themes included The dark continents (1991), with the following year, the five hundredth anniversary of the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain (the theme chosen in preference to that of the discovery of America), or The near, the far (1997), cultivated a point of view about mixed identity, and incorporating the intimate and the historic, long before the big intellectual and aesthetic debates of the age of globalisation.
So it was within the region that dance invented this major event – with each side relying on its own forces of desire. An event that is devoid of any complexes about stating its ambition to express views about the world and commit to renewed research, as part of the unlimited experience of meeting with a wide public. In the heart of Montpellier, Agora, the International dance centre, will soon be equipped with two additional studios and accommodation for a dozen performers. As a complement to the facility at the Chai du Terral, and in keeping with dance imperatives, these new spaces will provide scope for the festival to host international performers for creative residencies. There are also plans to restore the courtyard of the Ursulines as a summer theatre, where under the stars, the heart of a festival of encounters will continue to beat into the future.