bouba landrille tchouda

‘I need to meet different people every day. My dance is of a melting-pot society I like to study.”

Like many other hip-hop dancers, Bouba Landrille Tchouda has started as a self-taught artist in the middle of the 1980s. His curiosity has driven him to go to Brasil in Salvador de Bahia and Fortaleza to learn capoeira in the Nordeste style.

In 1995, he founded his first company, ACA, in Saint-Martin d’Hères with Habib Adel, a dancer of the same generation. Their first creation, Old Up, has paved their way to professional acceptance via its presentation in 1996 at the Paris Danse Ville Danse Festival.

Bouba Landrille Tchouda’s approach to dance is that of intensity in interpretation and thoughtfulness in choreography. His multifaceted work is influenced by hip-hop, capoeira and contemporary dance resulting in powerful creations. His route into dance has always been hybrid and made of unique encounters, therefore leading him to explore over and over again the countless possibilities of the dance grammar, to push its limits and move over the borders of styles and genres.

He teams up with artists with diverse background aesthetics. He danced with Accrorap Company, now at the artistic direction of the La Rochelle Centre Chorégraphique National, fort he pieces Mpanandro and Quilombo. He also created the SMH Duo with choreographer Jean-Claude Galotta in 1997. Bouba is one of the dancers and choreographers who went from hip-hop to a deeply personal contemporary dance syntax.

In 2001, he founded the Malka Company and immediately found a warm welcome at La Rampe in Echirolles. During this 9-year residency, he associated with Guy Boley, a playwright with a long history in writing for circus and street artists. Under his influence, Bouba shaped plays laced with poetry and engagement and pioneered in a new style of spoken-word hip-hop that shed the lights to national and international fame. That’s when he created his signature pieces : Malandragem for the Year of Brazil in France, Des Mots, Regarde-Moi, Meia Lua (for the Year of France in Brazil)… and Murmures with the aid of the Théâtre National de Chaillot, which was presented at the 2012 Lyon Dance Biennale.

In the same energy and during his 2011 to 2016 residency at Le Chateau Rouge in Annemasse, he created an elegant play about human relationships called Têtes d’Affiches and an offbeat Nutcracker based on Tchaikovsky’s music. In 2014, he was the artistic director of Anne Nguyen and Farid Berki’s triptych La preuve par l’autre. In 2015, he associated with Antwerp-based composer Guy Van Nueten to create the duo Skin – Sous la peau, dans la chair, tinted with multicoloured musical, generation and cultural shades.

As an associated artist at the MC2 Grenoble from 2015 to 2017 and at La Maison de la Danse de Lyon in 2016-2017, he produced Boomerang, an explosive sketch of society’s contrasted behaviours.

Bouba Landrille Tchouda has been named a knight of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2015 (the highest French decoration in the cultural field).

More recently, Bouba directed La dernière saison, a show by the Cirque Plume, which was presented in Paris at the Villette in the autumn of 2018. He has been in residency with the Isère department to work on artistic education in the rural areas in 2018-2019. From 2019 to 2021, he was an associated artist to Le Rive Gauche in Normandy. Since 2022 and until 2023, the company has a new residency in Isère.

Bouba has also been taking part in the adventure of the biggest dance parade of Europe since its beginning in 1996: the Lyon Dance Biennale Parade. He has been inventing participative street choreographies with many local and social structures in the region and in Switzerland since 1998. That is the core of Bouba’s work: sharing with local inhabitants and teaching the amateurs via workshops and masterclasses. He has recently been working on a play with Grenoblian teenagers called Les gens d’à côté in 2018 and, in 2020-2021 one about the African influences in dance : Mamie Wata.

Bouba’s dance is a harmony of hip-hop and other disciplines. In his 2018 work Des air(e)s d’anges, dancers from various backgrounds use many effects, be them acrobatic, performative or jumps to link with the audience. The dance score is both technical and generous, physical, and subtle.

In 2019, Bouba painted a self-portrait in his choreographic piece J’ai pas toujours dansé comme ça (litt: “I’ve not always danced like that”). With the artistic assistance of director Nasser Djemaï, he gives out a part of his own history, an intimate moment of sharing what sincerely moves the artist when he creates.

With Miracles, a piece made in the middle of COVID lockdown, Bouba champions advocates for dance as a creature of influences, of reactions to others… in a sensible and humanist play.

In his 2022 play Barulhos (Portuguese for “noise”), Bouba is on the hunt for how sounds, and urban noises in particular, affect the bodies and shapes the dance itself.