La Danse aux poings de Mourad Merzouki

Mourad Merzouki practiced boxing from 5 to 8 in parallel with martial arts, circus and hip hop. 20 years later, he remembers…and creates “Boxe Boxe” in september 2010 to show the poetry of the “noble art”.

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

Physically confronting boxing again, taking it on stage with the sole help of dancers, i.e. based on their hip hop and contemporary vocabulary, treating it in a light-hearted, quirky manner and, to do this, calling on the Quatuor Debussy, also present on stage, with musics ranging from Verdi and Schubert to Phil Glass, from Gorecki to Glen Miller: these are some of the challenges that Merzouki set himself for Boxe Boxe. The creation of the work in Lyon, followed by its performances at the Théâtre National de Chaillot provided an opportunity to paint this portrait and to trace an exemplary career. Effectively, since he started in 1994, the founder of the Käfig company, the initiator and director of the Pôle Pik center in Bron, and the director since June 2009 of the Centre Chorégraphique National de Créteil et du Val-de-Marne, has created some fifteen shows performed the world over, thereby contributing to the passage of hip hop from the street to the stage.

Mourad Merzouki

“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