COMPAGNIE KÄFIG

Biography

Since its creation in 1996, Compagnie Käfig has presented 27 original productions in more than 700 cities worldwide.
Over more than twenty years of activity, the company has performed over 2,800 shows in 58 countries, reaching an audience of more than one million spectators. The rhythm of the company’s life is marked by an average of 140 performances each season around the world, with five different productions currently touring.
The word Käfig — meaning “cage” in both German and Arabic — was also the title of the piece choreographer Mourad Merzouki presented in 1996 at the Rencontres Urbaines de la Villette competition, where it received immediate acclaim from both audiences and critics.
The company’s breakthrough came in 1998 with Récital, a remarkable encounter between hip-hop dance and a classical violinist. The production led to a three-year international tour across more than 40 countries, accumulating over 400 performances to date and later entering the repertoire of other companies. It also became the first — and still the only — hip-hop creation to be transcribed using Labanotation.
Since 1996, Mourad Merzouki has continuously reinvented the language of hip-hop, challenging and expanding it beyond its purely social roots in order to bring it onto the theatrical stage through a rich diversity of choreographic, scenographic, and aesthetic forms.
Today, Compagnie Käfig is considered one of the most important hip-hop dance companies in France, distinguished by a unique style shaped by openness toward other choreographic and artistic languages.
Without denying its origins and far removed from social stereotypes, the company has helped hip-hop reach a broad and diverse audience, just as diverse as the dancers themselves.
This wide-ranging artistic vision allows the choreographer to conceive each new production as a truly total performance experience.