— Bouzid Ait Atmane

Bouzid Ait Atmane

—Member of the FAIR-E collective / CCN de Rennes et de Bretagne

A LANGUAGE OF ENCOUNTERS

From battle to stage, from video game to performance: Bouzid Ait Atmane builds a body of work that refuses to choose between worlds, making their encounters his language.

Bouzid Ait Atmane moves between the ground and upright positions, between breaking and locking—a dance rooted in funk and spontaneity—which he adopts as his first language. In the cypher, “Zid” develops a taste for the direct, the concrete, and the vocabulary of the battle.

This relationship to confrontation feeds his early works. Dans l’arène (2015), co-choreographed with Yanka Pédron, moves between training and competition, navigating the boundary between battle and stage. R1R2 START (2017), his first solo, engages with digital codes in a tribute to video game culture—familiar territory he had already explored as a performer with the collective Géométrie Variable.

The notion of play—its rules, margins, and possibilities—runs through his entire body of work. Manège (2020) revisits childhood memories by inviting six performers onto the rotating platform of a carousel, between kinetic movement and visual punchlines. At the same time, he invents battle formats as experimental fields: The Ones brings together crews and schools with plural aesthetics; the Fighting Dance Battle, co-created with the association 3 Hit Combo, merges dance and fighting video games within a single framework. Since 2024, he has also been artistic director of the Battle des écoles, a large-scale arts education project that turns competition into a tool for transmission and encounters between young people.

His next piece, Rewind, continues this research at the intersection of dance and digital technologies, with creation planned for 2027–2028.

Member of the FAIR-E collective · Co-director of CCN de Rennes et de Bretagne.