ACCRORAP

Biography

KADER ATTOU
Dancer, choreographer and artistic director of the Accrorap company, Kader Attou is one of the leading figures of hip-hop dance. With a humanistic artistic approach open to the world—blending influences and breaking down barriers between genres—Attou has helped transform hip-hop into a new form of auteur dance, now recognized as a uniquely French artistic expression.

THE FEVER OF THE 1990s
In 1989, driven by the excitement of discovering breakdance, Kader Attou founded the Accrorap company together with his circus-artist friends Eric Mezino, Chaouki Saïd, Lionel Frédoc and Mourad Merzouki, seeking to move beyond street performances and give deeper meaning to their choreography.
Acrobatics, breakdance and classical dance combined to make Athina a success at the 1994 Lyon Dance Biennale, heralding a choreographic revolution and the emergence of hip-hop dance capable of conquering the stages of institutional theatre.

TRAVELS AND ENCOUNTERS: THE HEART OF HIS ARTISTIC APPROACH
From 1996 onward, Kader Attou became the sole director of the Accrorap company and continued its journey with numerous creations and tours in France and abroad. His dance is based on sharing, dialogue between cultures and the exchange of aesthetic visions.
His work draws inspiration from many disciplines, including circus, contemporary dance, Indian dance, visual arts, traditional Arabic music, classical music, hip-hop and electroacoustic music. His travels and encounters provide the raw material for his creations. Anokha (2000), for example, blends hip-hop with classical Indian dance, while Les corps étrangers (2006) builds bridges between France, India, Brazil, Algeria and Côte d’Ivoire.
As the son of immigrants, questions of identity, difference and otherness lie at the core of his approach, transforming his dance into a place of convergence where a community of bodies and emotions is created.

CREATING SENSITIVE UNIVERSES TO REVEAL THE POETRY OF HIP-HOP
From the beginning, Attou has viewed hip-hop dance as both an art form and a field of research, but also—what makes it so unique—as a way of bearing witness to the human condition and reflecting on social issues.
Allowing himself the freedom to invent a rich and open-ended dance language, he continues to creatively renew hip-hop without denying its founding values. With Symfonia Pieśni Żałosnych by the Polish composer Henryk Górecki, he became the only hip-hop choreographer to create a work based on an entire classical musical composition, exploring the connection between the energies and intentions of his plural dance language and those of the music and instruments.
In 2021 he created Les Autres, a piece for six dancers with a hip-hop and contemporary aesthetic, accompanied by two musicians playing rare and unusual instruments: a Cristal Baschet and a theremin. In this work, Kader Attou renews the dialogue between music, dance and scenography within a universe that favors the strange and the poetic.

ACTIONS AND RECOGNITION
In 2008, Kader Attou was appointed director of the CCN de La Rochelle et du Poitou-Charentes, becoming the first hip-hop choreographer to lead such an institution. There he developed a large-scale cultural project with a strong international dimension.
He supported the creation of several companies and in 2016 founded the Shake Festival to promote the diversity of hip-hop dance.
In 2013 he was promoted to the rank of Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and in 2015 he was named Chevalier of the Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur.
Since 2022, the company has been based at the Friche la Belle de Mai in Marseille, in southern France. He is also an associated artist with Scènes et Cinés, a conventioned venue for Art en territoire.