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Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s debut as a choreographer was in 1999 with Andrew Wale’s contemporary musical, Anonymous Society. Since then, he has made over 50 full-fledged choreographic pieces and picked up a slew of awards, including two Olivier Awards, three Ballet Tanz awards for Best Choreographer (2008, 2011, 2017) and the Kairos Prize (2009) for his artistic vision and his quest for intercultural dialogue.
In 2008 Cherkaoui premiered Sutra at Sadler’s Wells. This award-winning collaboration with artist Antony Gormley and the Shaolin monks continues to tour the world to great critical acclaim. After his first commissioned piece in North America, Orbo Novo (Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet) and a series of duets such as Faun (which premiered at Sadler’s Wells as part of In the Spirit of Diaghilev) and Dunas with flamenco dancer María Pagés (both 2009), he launched his own company Eastman, resident at DE SINGEL International Arts Centre (Antwerp).
In 2015, Cherkaoui directed his first full-length theatre production Pluto based on the award-winning manga series by Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki at Bunkamura in Tokyo, bringing the beloved manga character Astro Boy to life on stage, and was movement director for Lyndsey Turner's Hamlet starring Benedict Cumberbatch at the Barbican Centre in London. He also made a trio Harbor Me commissioned by the L.A. Dance Project and choreographed a new Firebird for Stuttgart Ballet. In the same year, Cherkaoui created a new production Fractus V for his company Eastman, in which he also performs.
Since 2015, Cherkaoui has been artistic director at the Royal Ballet Flanders, where he has created Fall (2015), Exhibition (2016) and Requiem (2017). He combines this function with his title as artistic director of Eastman and keeps creating new work along with the artistic entourage of this company.
In 2019, Cherkaoui made his Broadway debut as choreographer for the Alanis Morissette musical Jagged Little Pill, directed by Diane Paulus and with a book by Diablo Cody. For this production, he was nominated for a Tony Award in the category Best Choreography. He is the first Belgian choreographer to be nominated in this category.
Starting from the season 2022-2023, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui will direct the Ballet of the Grand Théâtre de Genève. He is also an associate artist at Sadler’s Wells (London) and Théâtre National de Bretagne (Rennes).
Damien Jalet is an independent Belgian and French choreographer and dancer whose work has been presented all over the world. Interested in the capacity of dance constantly reinventing itself by conversing with other media such as visual art, music, cinema, theatre and fashion; his works are often collaborative. He worked as a choreographer and dancer for companies such as les ballets C de la B, Sasha Waltz & Guests, Chunky Move, Eastman, NYDC, Hessisches Staatsballetts, Paris Opera Ballet, Scottish Dance Theatre, Iceland Dance Company, GöteborgsOperans Danskompani and few more.
In 2019, he became artist in residence at Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris. He choreographed the entirely danced film Anima directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Thom Yorke who also scored the film. It premiered in June in IMAX theatres and on Netflix. For this work, also nominated Best Musical Film at the 2019 GRAMMY Awards, he won the Best Choreography Award at the UK Music Video Awards. The same year, he created four numbers with Madonna for her first theatrical tour Madame X, including the show opening and a live version of the 1998 song Frozen.
In 2020, he directed the runway show of Jun Takahashi’s Undercover at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris with a collection inspired by Akira Kurosawa ‘s “throne of blood”, that joined later the list of the top runways of all time according to Tim Blanks of B.O.F.
In September 2020, as a reaction to the COVID-19 crisis, he accepted the last-minute offer from the Paris Opera Ballet to create a piece performed on the proscenium of Palais Garnier; he created Brise-lames with visual artist JR, pianist Koki Nakano and dancer Aimilios Arapoglou, Jalet’s artistic partner in all his key projects.
His next projects include the creation Mist for Dutch company NDT1 and Planet [wanderer] that is planned to premiere in Théâtre de Chaillot in September 2021. Both are collaborations with Kohei Nawa.
Damien Jalet was named Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 2013.
Having briefly studied contemporary dance at Cambridge as an extra-curricular activity, Antony Gormley has taken an active interest in the choreographic worlds of Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Pina Bausch, Bill Forsythe, Siobhan Davies and Michael Clarke. The inspiration of pure dance, with the body released as an expressive subject in its own right, detached from concerns with narrative, has been an inspiration for thirty years. He is less interested in the courtly disciplines of traditional ballet and more in the evolution begun by Martha Graham in which the body and its relationship to the floor and gravity opened up new expressive potentials for the language of the body in motion.
While spending a great deal of time trying to make material equivalents to what it feels like to inhabit a body, Antony Gormley has always had great interest in watching other bodies in dance. He considers the dancer’s life the most generous and demanding of any profession using life itself as the primary medium of communication.
Antony Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. His work has developed the potential opened up by sculpture since the 1960s through a critical engagement with both his own body and those of others in a way that confronts fundamental questions of where human beings stand in relation to nature and the cosmos. Gormley continually tries to identify the space of art as a place of becoming in which new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise.
Gormley’s work has been widely exhibited throughout the UK and internationally. His work in dance includes the critically acclaimed collaborations with Akram Khan, Hofesh Shechter, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Nitin Sawhney on zero degrees (2005, Sadler’s Wells) and again with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui on Sutra (2008, Sadler’s Wells); Babel(words) (2010, Sadler’s Wells) for which he was given an Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance for the design of the set (2011); Noetic (2014, Göteborg Opera) and on Icon (2016, Göteborg Opera).