Alain Platel

Alain Platel (born 9 April 1956) is a Belgian choreographer and director.

Alain Platel was born in Ghent in 1956.

In 1969, he was accepted to study at the Hoste-Sabbattini Mime Centre in Ghent.

He trained as a remedial educationalist, working with physically and mentally disabled children, but continued to study mime (with Wim Vandekerckhove) and later to take courses at the Paul Grinwis Academy of Ballet.

In 1980, he attended a contemporary dance workshop led by the Canadian choreographer Barbara Pearce in Paris, and went on to dance in her production Patchwork.

As a director, Platel is self-taught.

Stabat Mater was the first in a succession of small-scale productions made by les ballets C de la B during the late 1980s and early 1990s, for which Platel shared directing roles with other members of the company.

In 1984, he founded les ballets C de la B, which has been called 'one of the world's most influential dance theatre companies'.

Platel came to prominence alongside choreographers like Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Wim Vandekeybus in what became known as the Flemish Wave.

Platel founded les ballets C de la B in 1984 on a dare from a former teacher.

Along with his sister Pascale and their friend Johan Grimonprez, Platel devised and staged a performance in his loft in Ghent (Stabat Mater).

They ironically called themselves 'Les Ballets Contemporains de la Belgique': a name which stuck, albeit in a shortened form.

A producer from Antwerp's De Beweeging Festival was present at the performance and invited the newly formed company to perform at the festival.

Les ballets C de la B quickly achieved a modest level of national success, but their major break came in 1993, when a group of international theatre programmers happened to see Platel's Bonjour madame… at a festival in Amsterdam, which led to European tour bookings and a rapidly growing profile on the international dance scene.

Between 1993 and 2003, les ballets C de la B produced an increasing number of larger-scale projects, securing international commissions and state funding from the Flemish government.

Run as a collective, the company's performers were encouraged to develop their own choreography and Platel shared directing duties with other members including Hans Van den Broeck, Christine De Smedt and Koen Augustijnen.

Platel's productions included three collaborations with the author and theatre-maker Arne Sierens and Ghent-based youth theatre company Victoria (Moeder en kind, Bernadetje, allemaal indiaan).

At the same time, Platel began incorporating live musicians within his choreography, in a series of productions constructed around the work of famous composers, beginning with La Tristeza Complice (1995), a co-production with the music theatre company LOD muziektheater, which featured music by Henry Purcell arranged for ten accordionists.

Platel organised the Beste Belgische Danssolo competition between 1995 and 1997, open to solos of any style and designed to discover new talent.

The first competition was won by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, who subsequently performed in Iets op Bach and would go on to choreograph many of les ballets C de la B's productions.

This was followed by Iets op Bach (1998): the first of several works based on music by the director's favourite composer, J. S. Bach.

Shortly after making allemaal indiaan (1999), Platel announced that he would no longer be making productions.

His work includes large-scale celebrations of amateur performance, such as Because I Sing (2001) which featured sixteen London choirs (reprised in 2006 in Brussels as Uit de Bol/Coup de chœurs), and le Sacre du Printemps (2018): a 'mass choreography' that involved 300 participants from various Ghent dance groups.

Gardenia featured a cast of seven drag queens, all aged between 55 and 65 years, inspired by the closing of a Barcelona drag cabaret.

Platel's choreographic work is also concerned with the unconscious: with uncontrolled, unconditioned or arbitrary movements, tics and spasms, which he has described as 'bastard dance'.

During his hiatus from directing, Alain Platel studied sign language and continued to work with amateur and semi-professional performers from varied backgrounds, as documented in his collaborations with the documentarian Sophie Fiennes (Because I Sing, 2002; Ramallah! Ramallah! Ramallah!, 2004).

Nevertheless, he returned to les ballets C de la B in 2003 with Wolf, commissioned by the Ruhrtriennale, which used music by Mozart and counted fourteen dogs among its performers.

In 2006, Platel directed his own full-length documentary about the dancers of les ballets C de la B, entitled les ballets de ci de là.

In the same year, Platel returned to the company as a director, with vsprs (2006), based on Monteverdi's Vespers.

This production cemented the director's collaboration with the composer Fabrizio Cassol, which began with the participatory choral project Uit de Bol (2006), and would continue with pitié! (2008), Coup Fatal (2014) and Requiem pour L. (2018).

Since 2006, Platel has continued to direct new work with les ballets C de la B, usually in collaboration with other artists.

The movement material explored in projects such as vsprs (2006), Out of Context — for Pina (2010) and tauberbach (2014) was informed by Platel's own experience working with disabled children and adults.

Platel has acknowledged Pina Bausch as an important inspiration, calling himself 'a child of Bausch'.

Nine Finger (2007) was made with actor Benjamin Verdonck and Fumiyo Ikeda of Rosas, while Gardenia (2010) and En avant, marche! (2015) were collaborations with the director Frank Van Laecke and Platel's regular music director Steven Prengels.

Platel currently lives in Ghent.

In his own productions and in his influence on the overall aesthetics of les ballets C de la B, Alain Platel's work is characterised by the extensive, often chaotic combination of dance, theatre, live music, circus and other performance styles.

Most of his later productions are structured around live performances of famous classical works, with the musicians being fully involved in the choreography.

A particularly grand example of this is C(H)ŒURS (2011), which featured the 72-person chorus of the Teatro Real Madrid performing operatic choruses by Wagner and Verdi.

Often, the music is extensively reconstructed or rearranged by Platel's musical collaborators; Coup Fatal (2014) involves a Congolese band performing Baroque arias, while nicht schlafen (2016) combines music by Mahler with African polyphonic chant.

Platel's productions have always involved varied ensembles of performers with different skills, levels of training, backgrounds and body types, including amateurs, children and elderly performers.