30 YEARS OF GRENADE

Josette Baïz, who trained with Odile Duboc, has been teaching contemporary dance since 1978 in Aix-en-Provence, where she created her first choreographies for young dancers from her classes. In 1989, the French Ministry of Culture offered her a one-year residency at La Bricarde primary school in Marseille’s northern suburbs. Her encounters with young people of diverse origins and cultures led her to rethink the meaning of her work and radically alter her artistic approach.
In 1992, she created the Groupe Grenade, a group of over thirty young dancers, and then the Compagnie Grenade in 1998, a logical extension of the work she had been doing since 1992.

In recent years, Grenade has also opened up to other forms of contemporary dance; The younger members of the group have danced pieces by Eun-Me Ahn, Jérôme Bel, Dominique Bagouet, Lucinda Childs, Philippe Découflé, Jean-Claude Gallotta, Emanuel Gat, Lucy Guerin, Rui Horta and Damien Jalet, Michel Kelemenis, Akram Khan, Abou Lagraa, (LA)HORDE, Jean-Christophe Maillot, Barak Marshall, Wayne McGregor, Angelin Preljocaj, Crystal Pite, Alban Richard, Hofesh Shechter, Wim Vandekeybus.

Les professionnels de la Compagnie Grenade ont, quant à eux, interprété des pièces de Germaine Acogny, Eun-Me Ahn, Kader Attou, Joëlle Bouvier et Régis Obadia, Claude Brumachon, Nicolas Chaigneau et Claire Laureau, Katharina Christl, Patrick Delcroix, Sharon Fridman, Dominique Hervieu, Sun-A Lee, Blanca Li, Aïcha M’Barek et Hafiz Dhaou, Ohad Navarin, Iván Pérez, Angelin Preljocaj, Richard Siegal.

Today, Grenade is a choreographic ensemble made up of seventy dancers divided between the Group and the Company. A hip-hop unit has recently been set up to offer ‘all-terrain’ performances.

In 2022, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Grenade, Josette Baïz has devised 2 shows for the dancers of the Group and the Company, as well as a book edited by Philippe Verrièle retracing this educational and artistic adventure Josette Baïz : Enfants, Grenade et autres danseurs and a choreographic film – La tête à l’envers directed by Josette Baïz and Luc Riolon, with 42 dancers from the Group.

PHŒNIX

A triptych, Past, Present and Future, that takes us through the different cycles of Granada’s life.

The dancers are at the heart of this anniversary creation. Josette Baïz has woven the narrative thread of the piece around their experiences and reflections. She asked them about the disruption and loss of bearings caused by the period of confinement. Faced with the pervasive theme of loneliness, the choreographer urged them towards resilience with this injunction: ‘Go towards transformation…. [Find the light in the shadows’.

The result is compositions marked by the Grenade style, whose strength lies in the collective while allowing each individuality to express itself. The dancers’ bodies, nourished by multiple choreographic influences, are at first broken, animated by constrained, jerky gestures. Gradually, however, life takes over, the bodies loosen up, the movements open up and express a furious joie de vivre. In these troubled times, PHŒNIX offers an experience that resonates with everyone and sweeps us along in a collective rebirth. Powerful and essential.

The preamble to this piece also evokes Grenade’s past, with a video clip featuring the first dancers who formed the Grenade company. They performed an extract from Tonight, in particular the mythical, frenzied scene in the underground car park, the climax of the film West Side Story.

A second clip was shot with the children of Groupe Grenade, l’avenir.

How will this generation, known as Alpha, take hold of a choreographic object and perhaps invent a new way of conceiving the world?

LA TÊTE À L’ENVERS

THE CHOREOGRAPHIC FILM BY JOSETTE BAÏZ AND LUC RIOLON

Produced to mark the 30th anniversary of Granada, La tête à l’envers follows on from Mansouria, which Luc Riolon filmed in 1991 with young Granada dancers.

Thirty years have passed, but the questions are the same.

La tête à l’envers plunges us into the world of the children and teenagers of today’s Groupe. What do they have to offer the world of their dreams? What motivates them, transports them, makes them dream or laugh?

This choreographic film was shot in July 2022 in the Studio of the Pavillon Sainte Victoire in Le Tholonet.

A little angel with red curls, inspired by the film Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders, is imbued with the intimate thoughts of the children and teenagers of Granada, and acts as a conduit for their dreams and questions about the world around them.

DEMAIN, C’EST LOIN !

How can young people make tomorrow’s world their own?

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Groupe Grenade, Josette Baïz has teamed up with (LA)HORDE, the collective behind the Ballet National de Marseille, and Australian choreographer Lucy Guerin for a kaleidoscopic programme of 3 pieces on the theme of revolt and the non-resignation of young people in relation to the current situation.

By turns spirited, facetious, mutinous, agitators, insubordinate and angry, the young dancers commit themselves to each piece with powerful energy.

In Lucy Guerin’s How can we live together? they share her reflections on the evolution of the social body, between formalism and confusion, submission and resistance.

They slip into Room With a View, an emblematic piece by the collective (LA)HORDE, to express the revolt of youth, its insubordination and its imagination in the face of chaos.

And, like a thread stretching between the two works, Josette Baïz revisits her 1982 creation 25e Parallèle, with which she won the Bagnolet competition, leaving a tension that allows us to move from one universe to the other.

A powerful cry for a new path.

JOSETTE BAÏZ CHILDREN, GRENADE…ET OTHER DANCERS

Editions Riveneuve – Collection l’Univers d’un Chorégraphe edited by Philippe Verrièle

Revisit the 30 years of Groupe Grenade and the career of Josette Baïz in this beautiful book, where the views of dance critics, journalists and authors come together.

(Re)discover the Grenade adventure!

Click here to find out more