Alain Michard is a choreographer and visual artis.
He creates for the stage and for contemporary art spaces. Taking dance as his point of departure, he pursues various artistic projects in parallel, using different mediums: music, film, photography and text. He frequently works with other artists on collaborative projects, commissions, or invitations for research periods.
He invites amateurs to participate in certain projects, or local residents of the venues hosting the projects (Virvoucher, À domicile, +si affinités, Autour de la table, École ouverte, …).
His work explores the themes of wandering, community building, and he composes variations on particular motifs: walking, the accident, the loop, accumulation, etc.
His pieces stage everyday bodies, balancing between the absurd and a poetics of the state of crisis. They offer elaborate visual worlds in which the body is apprehended as a lowly, recycled object, in an assertive aesthetics of bricolage. Sound and music always play a crucial role, in the form of sonic dramaturgy.
His interest in cinema and young audiences led him to create Le beau mariage, celebrating the relationship between dance and cinema. En danseuse pursues this concern with the relationship between dance and image, a project in which he invites choreographers to seek out in their own bodies a personal History of dance.
In parallel to his work for the stage, Alain Michard creates pieces for public space, based on the perception and imaginary of cities and landscapes (Virvoucher, Promenades blanches, Se fonder, Caravane….).
An important area of inquiry for Alain Michard involves exploring the notions of the living document, a collective History of art, giving rise to a range of forms: J’ai tout donné, École ouverte, La carpe et le lapin, etc.
His films range from documentary to fiction, some are linked to dance (Ascension, Carton, ON AIR, Clandestine, Journal d’En danseuse).
Alain Michard’s work has been shown in France (Paris, Caen, Marseille, Brest, Rennes,…) and abroad (Montreal, Instanbul, Sao Paolo, Tokyo, Kyoto, Antwerp, etc.).