Assemblé is a mediation programme created by the Centre national de la danse in 2020, echoing 1 km de danse, a dance festival in Pantin. From 2020 to 2025, Assemblé has invited residents of a different town each year to meet, share dances and create a collective dance.
With a long-term perspective, Assemblé invited participants to delve into their cultural dance heritage. Designed as a place for sharing and transmission, Assemblé calls for living together and building society in common.
Assemblé sought to encourage the emergence of dances, to promote them in their diversity and specificity. Rediscovering the dances we knew as children, imagining those we would like to learn, exploring dances from a family tradition, sharing dances seen on social media, in a playground or in a theater, or even those learned at a party or a neighborhood dance workshop... Assemblé sought to bring all these bodies back to life, to reinvest in them, explore them, and awaken their creative potential.
Through Assemblé, the CN D continued to experiment with ways of mediating dance: mixing audiences, articulating multiple practices over a long period of time, building multi-partner relationships, and supporting groups with an artist-mediator duo. In this way, Assemblé connected mediation, creation, and transmission.
During the rollout of the program, the CN D invited partner cultural organizations to implement the program in their areas. The partners received support throughout the project with group meetings and individual exchanges.
From 2020 to 2025, the CND experimented with Assemblé with
The residents of
Bobigny, Cergy, Les Lilas, Pantin, and Romainville
Partner organizations
Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis, Théâtre du Garde-Chasse in Les Lilas, Le Pavillon in Romainville, and the cultural department of the city of Bobigny.
Artists
Bettina Blanc Penther, Anna Chirescu, Rémy Heritier, Magda Kachouche, Wanjiru Kamuyu, Mélanie Perrier, Marcela Santander Corvalan, Féroz Sahoulamide, Agnieszka Ryszkiewicz
Mediators
Charline Bidault, Elisabetta Cuneggatti, Fanny Delmas, Sora Duchatelet, Anaïs Garcia, Rose Gourland, Théodora Le Meur, Samantha Mac Donald, Léa Sabran, Clélia Simon
Online tools and resources
Double voix, resource podcast produced by Charlotte Imbault
Designed as a series of cross-interviews, three artist-mediator pairs meet and discuss their experiences of Assemblé and the methodologies they have developed there.
- Flyer Assemblé in Pantin 2024-2025 - EN pdf 755.2 kB