Michel Hallet-Eghayan

Artistic Director and Choreographer
C.ie MICHEL HALLET-EGHAYAN
Lyon, France

 

Thirty-seven years of creation did nothing to blunt the energy of this Lyon choreographer born in 1946, founder of the Maison de la Danse, who develops an important path lined with a commitment to spread the Art and Dance in the City as a energy and the social cement.
 

In 1973, in New York, he discovered two essential masters Margaret Craske and Merce Cunningham. He then started in 1975 its creation cycle at the Dance Gallery in New York with "Premièrement".

In 1977, back in his hometown, he founded his company and the School. This double birth reflects the incessant connection between his creative work and training, a phenomenon that will only grow in strength.

Since then he has written around 70 works, some of which, like "Back to front", "Orlando Furioso", "The Island of streams", "Hommage à Kandinsky" are an anthology of the French contemporary dance.

Drawing from the source of our heritage sign, he creates his own language favoring choreographic form and movement.
After a first period of compositions on the theme of the Variation (1977 - 1990), he began work on the roots and ties between our origins and contemporary thought (1990-2000).

Then from 2000 he explores new ways between arts and sciences with Pascal Picq, paleoanthropologist at the Collège de France and Roland Bacon astrophysicist. This double work linking the omplicit artistic and the explicit scientific, gives rise to spectacular-danced conferences featuring the scientific alongside artists, but also to choreographic works more strictly speaking keeping only the signs of this search shared between arts and sciences. Rich of this experience, strong of these artistic and scientific potential and with a very beautiful theater in Lyon " Aux Echappées Belles", the future of his company looks bright.
 

He explores the heart of the large repertoire of the Company with "Retour en avant" (1983) recreated in 2008 at the opening of the International Dance Biennial of Lyon to which it gives its title, and which  continues with " Pour Giselle "(1982) revisited in 2011 for the Maison de la Danse in Lyon.
 

Works created with Roland Bacon and Pascal Picq - "13 heures et des poussieres..." "Which side story?" - Are now part of the repertoire, confirming their success from season to season.
This original project between Arts and Science in 2011 gives rise to the creation of the "Pôle Arts Sciences Society" and the setting in form of a "scientific committee" made up of all the universities of the Academy of Lyon, as well as some Grandes Ecoles, in order to develop real "Future Investments". This work is now expanding with the "Composition vivante", between dance, design, smart fabrics and new lights. The "Composition vivante" or "l'Art du Danseur" is explained and explored in the book of Michel Hallet Eghayan, "Letters to Isadora", prefaced by the philosopher Jean-François Mattei, the book published shortly EMCC Editions.

Between roots and future, the space it's his domain ...