Fondation Chaillot - Promoting dance as connection
The main mission of Fondation Chaillot is to support the new inclusive artistic initiatives of Chaillot - Théâtre national de la Danse. The project, which has been led by Director Rachid Ouramdane since 2021, was launched on May 23 under the aegis of Fondation de France. Read our interview with Pierre Lungheretti, Deputy Director of Chaillot - Théâtre national de la Danse, who serves as its representative in the new foundation.
Focused on diversity and audience experience, this project aims to make Chaillot a place that fosters connections and is accessible to everyone, especially the most vulnerable and those who are often excluded from cultural experiences. Chaired by Laurent Martinet, one of the four founding members alongside Jean-François Dubos and the companies Dior Couture and L'Oréal, the foundation will actively promote dance as a means for empowerment and social cohesion.
In an article published in Le Monde earlier this year which you co-authored with Rachid Ouramdane, you highlighted the role that art and culture can play in promoting social engagement and inclusivity. In your opinion, how does dance respond to the major issues facing society today, given the rise in inequalities and social divisions?
Dance, as an art of movement, involves the body, and we are all instinctively potential dancers. By virtue of its universal dimension, it erases a number of social distinctions linked in particular to language, which conveys many implicit social divisions. It's an art that encourages a physical relationship with others, and therefore awareness and respect for others. Dance has the ability to connect people across social classes and generations. Its intrinsic qualities make it a vehicle for individual and collective empowerment and social cohesion.
Your ambition, alongside Rachid Ouramdane, is to make Chaillot “a creator of connections, a theatre of diverse forms, audiences, and aesthetics that brings people together and is accessible to all”, in line with the ideal of popular art that the TNP (the previous occupant of the Chaillot palace) has embodied since its creation in 1920. How are you reinventing this principle at Chaillot a century later?
The new project we are developing with Rachid Ouramdane has two key pillars: diversity and audience experience, with the aim of making Chaillot a tool for social transformation and cohesion. To do this, we want to revive the spirit of Jean Vilar and make different forms of art accessible to as many people as possible, especially those who have difficulty accessing art for economic, social, and cultural reasons. Popular art is about sharing and inclusion.
To achieve this, we have been taking very practical steps over the last two years. For example, we have launched an action plan on audience experience within the Chaillot palace, to make it a welcoming, warm place in which everyone feels at home. To do this, we had to rethink the organisation of the palace's interior spaces, as well as the ways in which they could be used by proposing new event formats. We worked on these challenges with the Yes We Camp association. We have created and installed new welcoming and vibrant furniture and designed new signage and a new look for our foyer. We have also introduced new event formats, such as “Les samedis de Chaillot”, “Les Chaillot Rencontres” and “Chaillot Invite”, offering meetings with artists, creative workshops, introductory dance classes, round tables, etc. These communal events are open to all, completely free of charge, and are another way of experiencing the theatre beyond performances.
Laurent Martinet, Chairman of Fondation Chaillot, with Rachid Ouramdane and Pierre Lungheretti at the launch event at the Palais de Chaillot on 23 May.
What specific initiatives are you implementing for young people, who are at the heart of Chaillot's project as a theatre which prioritizes audience experience?
One of our major aims is to appeal to the younger generation, who are so engrossed in their screens and social networks that they are less and less likely to visit traditional cultural venues. This is a huge challenge for a cultural institution like Chaillot. The Chaillot Colo programme, launched two years ago with a number of partners including social centres, local education federations, and local authorities, is emblematic of this commitment. These are artistic holiday camps that we organise in different areas for groups of young people aged 11 to 18 who are generally far removed from culture and dance. These stays, staffed by both artists and specialist educators, have several goals: to offer young people an educational artistic experience through dance, but also to teach them about living with others. Since the first Chaillot Colo in July 2022, around twenty camps have taken place in different parts of the country, including the overseas territories. The feedback we've had from young people and supervisors has been excellent, encouraging us to continue this initiative.
More recently, we have also decided to include young people in our decision-making bodies by creating the Chaillot Youth Council in October 2023. It brings together around thirty young people between the ages of 18 and 25, selected in a draw following a call for applications. The aim of this Council is for young people to tell us about their habits and wishes, to give us new ideas, but also to become cultural ambassadors for other young people of their generation. We have also given them a budget of €20,000 a year to implement concrete actions.
The creation of Fondation Chaillot marks a new stage in the development of your project. What triggered the creation of this foundation? What are its missions?
Meeting Laurent Martinet, a lawyer and partner at Paul Hastings with a passion for the arts and culture and a strong commitment to advocacy, particularly concerning human rights, was decisive in the process of creating the foundation. We immediately felt a very strong alignment of our values and convictions. Following this meeting, another philanthropist, Jean-François Dubos, and two companies, Christian Dior Couture and L'Oréal, joined the venture.
The foundation’s main mission is to support the artistic and inclusive ambitions of the new Chaillot project and to promote the social empowerment and freedom dance offers as an art from that creates connections. It will act to support contemporary choreographic creation on a national and international scale, including in the digital world, but also to encourage social integration through dance and access to culture for as many people as possible, particularly young people. It will also take action to preserve the theatre's exceptional heritage. We are currently in the process of identifying the first initiatives that could be supported by the foundation, in particular fostering projects between Chaillot and regional socio-educational structures.
Beyond these missions, Fondation Chaillot is also a collective for reflection and exchange made up of experts with very diverse profiles. I am thinking in particular of the qualified members of the Foundation's Executive Committee: Françoise Nyssen, former Minister for Culture and former Chair of the Board of the publishing house Actes Sud, who is very involved in education through art; Laetitia Hélouet, President of the Observatoire national de la politique de la ville (National Observatory for Urban Policy), who will bring her considerable expertise in social integration and diversity; Violaine Huisman, writer and Artistic Director of the French Institute Alliance Française in New York, who is closely involved with the international creative scene; and Raphaël Barontini, a visual artist from the French overseas territories who works on the history and memory of the struggle against slavery. We will also be able to count on the support, experience, and expertise of Fondation de France, which provides us with support and with which we have a strong bond of trust.
Photos: Say Who / Ayka Lux
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