Têtes d’affiche

‘…This little opera in the race of desires’ did not leave the audience indifferent. A veritable critique of our individualistic behaviour, dictated by the desire to succeed at all costs, this show portrays five characters with very strong characters! (…) Everyone wants to be the one ahead, the first, the best, the indestructible. Bouba Landrille Tchouda’s talent is to tell all this without words, simply through a choreographic and scenographic style that is sharp, subtle and rhythmic. All he needs is an almost bare stage, delimited only by a dozen chairs with their backs to the audience, a slightly harsh light, sometimes with a play of light and shadow, and some heartfelt music, almost oppressive at times, to convey a certain cruelty of the world. You come out of the theatre breathless, shaken and questioned by so much hostility emanating from within ourselves…’.
Prune Vellot, 29 March 2013, les affiches de Grenoble et du Dauphiné 

‘…Bouba Landrille Tchouda’s new work is more or less driven by the same questions as his previous work (our relationship with others and the deep-seated motivations that influence their development), but it offers a new take on the subject, with a return to a more refined form, but also a more emotional and direct approach. Using a control group, a de facto community with no pre-established ties, he observes, with a mixture of empathy and laughing irony, the frenzied quest for individual identity and its various manifestations, from the innate need for seduction to exacerbated competitiveness, not forgetting the need to expose oneself and the risks that this entails. Summed up in this way, it might seem heavy, but it’s not. On the one hand, because the choreographer never adopts the posture of a moralist, and on the other because the fluidity of the form and the discreet but omnipresent humour finely convey notions that are hardly obvious to represent. Intense, subtle, intelligent and always full of life-saving vitality, Bouba’s body language continues to seduce us…’.
Damien Grimbert, 29 March 2013,  le petit Bulletin 

He loves it when movement eclipses words. When a man does without words to bring out the emotion. Without explanation. Just the intensity of a look, the power of an interpretation. ‘Dance touches the heart,’ says Bouba Landrille Tchouda. The choreographer readily admits to having been harpooned. He does not cheat with his art, which he uses to distil his message. In Têtes d’affiche, a 2012 creation that combines hiphop and contemporary dance, the founder of the Malka company has brought together six dancers of mixed origins and multiple influences. ‘This show is the one that comes closest to who I am and where I want to go as a choreographer,’ he says. In this piece, which opens with a queue of lonely, neurotic, ghostly bodies, Bouba Landrille Tchouda reflects on the complexity and difficulty of human relationships. The kind of relationships that keep us in war mode outside the home, bubbling with tension. It’s a reminder that everyone is a ‘potential danger’ to others. I believe in the ability of human beings to live together despite our differences,’ insists the choreographer. People often try to make us believe that it’s difficult, but there are 10,000 reasons why I want to prove the opposite. Bouba Landrille Tchouda refuses to provide the solution. He admits he doesn’t have one anyway. But he is happy to display these differences on stage, to ‘look for points of connection, little things that bring us together’ and which, in his eyes, are nothing but riches. (…)
Joan Moïse, Friday 18 January, le Républicain Lorraine