Angelin Preljoсaj

Angelin Preljoсaj – an outstanding choreographer, a renown living classic. In 2015 his Company — Ballet Preljocaj celebrated its 30 years. Preljocaj's ballets go on the world's leading stages: at the Paris Opera, at La Scala, at the Berlin Opera, at the New York City Ballet, at the Mariinsky Theater and at the Bolshoi Theater
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ANGELIN PRELJOCAJ was born in the Paris region, in France, and began studying classical ballet before turning to contemporary dance, which he studied with Karin Waehner. In 1980, he went to New York to work with Zena Rommett and Merce Cunningham, after which he resumed his studies in France, there his teachers included the American choreographer Viola Farber and the French one Quentin Rouillier. He then joined Dominique Bagouet before founding his own company in December 1984.

Angelin Preljocaj collaborates regularly with other artists including Enki Bilal (Roméo et Juliette, 1990), Goran Vejvoda (Paysageaprès la bataille, 1997), Air (Near Life Experience, 2003), Granular Synthesis (“N”, 2004), Fabrice Hyber (Les 4 saisons…, 2005), Karlheinz Stockhausen (Eldorado – Sonntags Abschied, 2007), Jean Paul Gaultier (Snow White, 2008), Constance Guisset (Le funambule, 2009), Claude Lévêque (Siddharta, 2010) and Laurent Garnier and Subodh Gupta (And then, one thousand years of peace, 2010)…

His productions are now part of the repertoire of many companies, many of which also commission original production from him, notably La Scala of Milan, the New York City Ballet and the Paris Opera Ballet. Since October 2006, the Ballet Preljocaj and its 26 permanent dancers have resided at the Pavillon Noir in Aix-en-Provence, a building entirely dedicated to dance, with Angelin Preljocaj as its artistic director.

«To dance! Just like that: to dance! To dance when you are not alone, to dance when you are lonely, and dance again and again. To dance in through foul and fair. To dance every moment as a need, to dance in despair and at time facing human-beings history. To dance any minute, to dance in silence, to dance lying in the noise and in rage, to dance squeezing up against the body of another, to dance notwithstanding, to dance for, to dance ighting the resistance of the air, to dance in order to live, in order to state, to dance in order to make people smile, to make them whisper, to dance with heart that is beating, with breathe that is breaking, to build fancy plans, to draw, to paint and again to dance, to dance in order to picture, to write a dance, to splash out words, to stare at waives, to attract other bodies, to join them, to encourage them to a secret ritual trying to captivate the world again and again, not to come there and not to despair, to keep on and on, to meet other magicians in order to learn, other poets in order to love, other mason in order to build and naive ones in order to believe, the warriors in order to resist, not to give up, to insist, to exaggerate and to enjoy, to, inally, enjoy the moment, enjoy the space, time; time that is passing away in order to turn time into alley and to dance with time, to dance mistimed, and on the contrary, to dance backwards, to run, to swim, to dance on one leg over the certainty, to dance twisting in order to feel the path of the universe, to dance with the entire world, and inally, to love this world, to love others without any words, not to sleep, to dance facing the wind, to dance in order to forget, to stay alone, to say good bye and to again establish in order to recall, and inally in order to remember that all this lasts just for an instant alike wing beat… In less than thirty years! The eternity! And suddenly to feel you are alive thinking of all that things you need to do, to bring to life so many of ideas, to make things come true and to think that, in fact, all that things are nothing, and later that all that things mean all, and the only essential is to reinvent each and every moment again».

– Angelin Preljoсaj