Bouba Landrille Tchouda is an intense dancer and a thoughtful choreographer. His approach to dance is multi-faceted, and his powerful work blends hip-hop, capoeira and contemporary dance. His cross-disciplinary background, made up of original encounters, fuels his exploration of the infinite possibilities of the language of dance, as he seeks to push back its limits and transcend genre barriers. His national and international tours have enabled him to position himself as a choreographer beyond our borders.
The energy of passion
“Expressing in flesh and blood, looking at and thinking about the world with the body, making a part of ourselves visible, putting our lives in motion, confronting our questions, nurturing an intimate dialogue between mind and gesture, bringing emotion and intelligence together.”
‘My dance is meant to be a dance that says, in all modesty, that we can use it to help change things, to bring a little poetry, to lighten everyday life. It’s a vibration that moves me from within to reach out to others. Dancing has enabled me to overcome what I thought was insurmountable’.
The beginnings
As with many hip-hop dancers, he began his apprenticeship as a self-taught dancer in the mid-80s. Curious, he set off to study capoeira in Salvador de Bahia and Fortaleza in north-east Brazil.
In 1995, he founded his first company ACA in St Martin d’Hères with Habib Adel, a dancer of the same generation. Their first creation, Old Up, presented in Paris in 1996 at the Danse Ville Danse meetings, opened the doors to the French professional sector.
Collaborations
He has worked with artists from a wide range of aesthetic backgrounds, including choreographer Jean-Claude Gallotta, with whom he created the duet SMH in 1997, and the Accrorap company, as dancer-choreographer in the pieces Mpanandro in 1998 and Quilombo in 2001. Bernard Kudlak, artistic director of Cirque Plume, called on Bouba in 2018 for the show La Dernière Saison. At the invitation of Dominique Hervieu, Artistic Director of the Lyon Dance Biennial, he will be choreographing a show on the theme of press freedom in Africa for the opening of the Dance Biennial Parade, using giant puppets in collaboration with the Cie Les Grandes Personnes, to be staged at the Théâtre Antique de Fourvière in June 2021.
He is one of a number of dancer-choreographers from the hip hop movement who have developed a unique contemporary choreographic style.
The Malka Company
In 2001, he founded the Malka company and was immediately welcomed into a residency at La Rampe, a Scène Conventionnée d’Intérêt National for dance and music, in Echirolles. Over the years, he has worked with playwright and writer Guy Boley, a seasoned veteran of the circus and street arts. With Boley’s help, the storylines of his shows gradually evolved into poetic, engaging narratives, producing a new style of hip hop storytelling that earned the company national recognition and recognition beyond our borders.
This nine-year partnership with La Rampe enabled the company to create its most emblematic pieces: Malandragem in 2005 (Year of Brazil in France), Des Mots in 2006, Regarde-Moi in 2007, Meia Lua in 2009 (Year of France in Brazil) then Murmures in 2010 with the support of the Théâtre National de Chaillot and presented at the Biennale de la danse in Lyon in 2012.
From 2011 to 2016, as part of his new residency at Château Rouge-Annemasse – Scène Conventionné d’Intérêt Nationale pour les Nouvelles écritures du corps et de la parole – he invented an elegant play about human relationships entitled Têtes d’Affiche, followed by an offbeat Casse-Noisette set to Tchaikovsky’s music. In 2014, he was artistic director of the triptych La preuve par l’autre with Anne Nguyen and Farid Berki, two major figures in French hip-hop writing. In 2015, he teamed up with Antwerp composer Guy Van Nueten to create Skin- Sous la peau, dans la chair.
In 2015, the choreographer was named Chevallier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Associate artist at the MC2 in Grenoble from 2015 to 2017 and at the Maison de la danse in Lyon in 2016/2017, he then produced Boomerang, an explosive painting of society’s contrasting behaviours.
Bouba choreographed La dernière saison, a show by Cirque Plume, notably presented at La Villette in Paris in autumn 2018. He will be in residence in the Bièvre-Valloire region from 2018 to 2020 and in the Matheysine region from 2022 to 2023, in the Isère department. It will be associated with the Rive Gauche, Scène conventionnée d’Intérêt Nationale pour la danse in St Etienne-du-Rouvray (Normandy) from 2019 to 2021.
Alongside his indoor creations, the artist has been involved in the adventure of Europe’s biggest parade, the Défilé de la Biennale de la danse de Lyon, for which he has been inventing participatory street choreography with the towns of Grenoble, Villeurbanne, St Priest, Annemasse, Greater Geneva and Bièvre Valloire since 1998. Sharing his work with local residents and passing it on to amateur dancers is at the heart of Bouba’s commitment to the city: workshops, master classes, training courses, etc. In 2018, he created a piece especially for teenagers, Les gens d’à côté, a refined piece that takes a close look at fragile bodies, magnified by video artist Mohamed Athamna.
Bouba invents hip-hop that is always in harmony with a demanding score, while continuing to explore other disciplines such as the circus arts. He created Des air(e)s d’anges in October 2018 at the Maison des Arts in Thonon.
In 2019, he will create a choreographic portrait, J’ai pas toujours dansé comme ça. With the artistic complicity of director Nasser Djemaï.
With Miracles, created in 2020 at the Rive Gauche in Normandy, in the context of a health crisis, the choreographer defends the idea of dance under influence, in reaction to other elements…
In Barulhos, premiered in 2022 at the MC2 in Grenoble, Bouba converts the noises of everyday life and the cracks of the world into a danced plea for the persistence of our times.
In his latest show, BreakDO, created in 2024 at the Friche-Belle-de-Mai in Marseille, with the support of Touka Danses, the Centre de Développement Chorégraphique National de Guyane, he explores an unprecedented dialogue between break dance and judo.