Opening of Dance Season 2026 pays tribute to Mourad Merzouki, French choreographer among the trailblazers in Hip Hop dance’s prolific transition from street practice to stage art. Active since the late 1980s, the author has been leading his own Compagnie Käfig, which just in Bologna will celebrate the 30th anniversary of its founding.
It is a reflection on the passage of time Beauséjour, a show chosen as the inaugural title. A kind of fresco intended by Hip Hop veteran Mourad Merzouki to take stock of his own artistic parabola and illuminate, therefore, with new light the constituent elements of his choreographic practice: the body, energy, and the search for beauty. “G uard to the worn body, the body that has lived, the body that bears the marks and pains of time,” says the choreographer, “nostalgia here is not a bitter feeling, it is a living force that is reborn and unfolds.
The electro-Latin sounds created ad hoc by Müller & Makaroff, a Swiss-Argentine tandem who founded in Paris in 1998 the Gotan Project music group that pioneered the electronic reinvention of the tango, evoke here a convivial “guinguette” dimension, skillfully rendered by set designer Benjamin Lebreton, in which one can hear the lyrics of MC and urban poet Fafapunk. Thus we reflect on the inexorable passage of time and the transformation of bodies, because beautiful dance is universal and transgenerational.