Kader Attou

Dancer, choreographer, and artistic director of the Accrorap Company, Kader Attou is one of the most outstanding representatives of hip-hop dance. With a humanist artistic approach and open to the world, merging influences and breaking down the barriers between genres, Kader Attou has contributed to the transformation of hip-hop into a new platform of dance, bringing to the forefront dance created by artists, and recognized as a genuine French specificity.

THE FEVER OF THE 1990s
In 1989, during the feverish discovery of breakdance, Kade Attou created the Accrorap Company with his circus friends Eric Mezino, Chaouki Saïd, Lionel Frédoc and Mourad Merzouki to move out of the world of street performance and to bring meaning to their choreography. Acrobatics, breakdance and ballet, bring much acclaim to Athina presented at the Biennale de la danse de Lyon in 1994, which announces a choreographic revolution and consecrates the birth of hip-hop dance as being capable of investing the stage of a theatre.

Taking the liberty to invent a rich dance that does not restrict itself in any way, he never ceases to renew hip-hop with creativity without denying its founding values. With Symfonia Piesni Załosnych by the Polish composer Henryk Gorecki, he will be the only hip-hop choreographer to create from a complete and classic musical work, exploring the link between the energies, the intentions of his plural dance form and those of the music and instruments.  In 2021, he creates Les Autres, a piece for six dancers of hip-hop and contemporary aesthetic origins, and two musicians whose instruments are as rare as they are unusual, a Cristal Baschet and a Theremin. With this creation, Kader Attou re-engages a dialogue between music, dance, and scenography in a universe that gives pride of place to the strange and poetic.

ACTS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
In 2008, Kader Attou is named director of the CCN de La Rochelle et du Poitou-Charentes, thus becoming the first hip-hop choreographer at the head of such an institution. He develops a large-scale cultural project for the territory with a strong international dimension. He accompanies the emergence of numerous companies and, in 2016, creates the Shake Festival which supports the diversity of hip-hop dance. In 2013, he is promoted to the rank of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 2015, he is appointed Chevalier dans l’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur.

Since 2022, he is based at the Friche la Belle de Mai in Marseille and established in the Southern Region. He is associate artist at Scènes et Cinés, Scène conventionnée Art en Territoire.
The creation of Prélude, a work for the territory, is an invitation by the choreographer Kader Attou to ten or so professional hip-hop dancers of the Region to explore his artistic universe. This “all terrain” work – presented for the first time during the Marseille festival – has the vocation of reaching all publics and bringing hip-hop dance to where it is least expected, the depths of choreographic creation to weave links between the leading partners of the territory and the artists.

In 2023, Kader Attou calls upon a quartet of dancers, men and women, the superb illustrations created by Jessie Désolée, and breathes life into a poetic world of creatures, full of imaginary monsters, fantastic plants and animals. Le Murmure des Songes, a work for all audiences from the age of 5, plunges us into the world of our childhood.