Wasteland

Hip-Hop Dance / Circus

Artistic direction & Choreography: Mourad Merzouki
Choreographic performance for 9 artists
Music: AS1N
Length: 65 minutes

Käfig celebrates its 10th anniversary and offers itself on stage Wasteland, a performance resembling the image company, vagrant, experimental and inventive. For his last creation, Mourad Merzouki chose to associate hip hop dancers with artists stemming from the circus and the theatre, all trying to outdo each other in audacity and virtuosity.

An old wooden fence surrounds the wasteland and a street light stands in the middle of it as a throne, in the background lies the noisy city. The desolate area is conducive to dreaming and madness where everything is allowed. A neglected place with its own code and rules but also a place where everything can be built and transformed, changed into something else, and invented. Down there, nothing is premeditated, everything follows up spontaneously, acrobatics and aerobatics, the virtuosity of figures, circling movements are as many possibilities that the dancers can explore.  The old woman, the pretty girl, the rogues, the young idle persons and the scenes following one another that fences and wastelands are not just no man’s lands but can be joyful, lively, free and areas full of hope where one can meet, laugh and dream at ease. A life scene that is both simple and complex, a great vector of feelings and emotion, an infinite source of creativity.

With a great sense of humour and irony in this energetic, dynamic and acrobatic dance performance, the artists perform an enjoyable story without falling into social analysis.
Mourad Merzouki, carries hip-hop to its paroxysm and invites us to a purely visual, sensorial, choreographic, musical journey bursting with vitality.

About Mourad Merzouki:
From the circus school to the hip-hop dance…

Mourad Merzouki was born in Lyon in 1973, from Kabyle origins, at the age of seven he started learning martial and circus arts.  At fifteen, he discovers hip-hop dance and then tries other types of choreographic languages.  The richness of his background led him to create artistic projects that mix hip-hop with other stage arts, and different approaches of performing.  Thus, he creates his first company Accrorap in 1989.  In 1994, the company presents Athina, which completely succeeded in moving hip-hop from the streets to the stage, without depriving it of its identity.  In 1996, Mourad Merzouki chose to start his own company, Käfig, it is considered today as the most important one in French hip-hop.

Visit Official Website