Olivier Dubois

Olivier Dubois has been shaking up the French contemporary dance scene for more than a decade with some of the most radical choreographic work to date. The director of Ballet du Nord from 2014 to 2017, he was named one of the twenty-five best dancers in the world in 2011 by Dance Europe magazine and boasts a unique experience working between creation, interpretation and pedagogy. Olivier Dubois has performed for Angelin Preljocaj, Cirque du Soleil, Jan Fabre, Dominique Boivin, Sasha Waltz and many others. In 2006, he was invited by the French Authors’ Society SACD and the Festival d’Avignon to create a piece as part of its ‘Les Sujets à vif’ series. His work Pour tout l’or du monde (For All the Gold in the World) subsequently received the jury prize from the Professional Critics’ Association. At the 2008 Festival d’Avignon, he created Faune(s), based on the famous piece by Nijinski, and won the Prix Jardin d’Europe, the European prize for emerging choreography. His exhibition L’interprète dévisagé (The Faceless Interpreter) at the Centre National de la Danse in Paris in 2009 was well received. In 2010, he presented Spectre, a commission by the Ballets de Monte-Carlo, and created L’homme de l’Atlantique, a duet based on the music of Frank Sinatra, for the Lyon Dance Biennale. In 2009, he started the trilogy Étude critique pour un trompe-l’œil (Critical Study for a Trompe L’Oeil) with the creation of Révolution (Revolution) at the Ménagerie de Verre in Paris, followed by the solo Rouge (Red) in 2011 and concluded by the provocative Tragédie (Tragedy), created at the Festival d’Avignon in 2012. As part of Marseille 2013, European Capital of Culture, Dubois created Élégie (Elegy) for the National Ballet of Marseille. The same year he was named best choreographer at the Danza & Danza Awards for Tragédie and Élégie. In 2015, he created two new pieces: Mon élue noire Sacre #2, a solo for Germaine Acogny, and Les Mémoires d’un seigneur, performed by a dancer from the Company and 40 male amateur dancers. Olivier Dubois also shares his creations with amateur dancers. In 2011, Envers et face à tous (Against and Facing All) was performed by 120 dancers at Prisme d’Élancourt, followed in 2013 by Origami, which featured 1,000 lower grade and high school students from Roubaix. During the last Nuit Blanche in Paris, he staged Mille et une danses (Thousand and One Dances) with the participation of 300 amateur dancers. Dubois also collaborates with the Ballet Junior de Genève training school. The trilogy Étude critique pour un trompe-l’œil (Critical Study for a Trompe L’Oeil) was concluded in 2016 with Auguri, a piece for 22 dancers that premiered at the International Summer Festival Kampnagel in Hamburg and was presented for the first time in France at the Biennale de Lyon. In February 2017, Olivier Dubois produced De l’origine (Of the Origin) for the Royal Swedish Ballet and 7 x Rien (7 x Nothing), his first piece for young audiences. In spring 2018, he performed a solo titled Pour sortir au jour (Coming Forth by Day), for which the premiere took place at the Festival de Marseille. The following year, Olivier Dubois created a new piece for 8 dancers and one musician, Tropismes, presented recently at CentQuatre-Paris. The result of two years of work between Egypt and France, its new French-Egyptian creation for 7 Egyptian performers (music and dance), Itmahrag premiered in January 2021 at La Filature, Scène nationale de Mulhouse.