Andrew Graham is a dancer and choreographer who has been based in Marseille for several years. He founded the inclusive dance company L’Autre Maison. His choreography rejects the notion of an ideal body and focuses on the diversity of the group, pushing back against all attempts to create stereotypes.
For eleven years, Andrew lived in London, where he worked with renowned artists and companies: Joan Jonas, Tino Seghal, Simon Forti, Mike Kelley, Xavier Leroy, Rosemary Butcher, Aurelia Thiérrée and Victoria Chaplin. In 2013 he joined the Candoco company, where he performed pieces by Trisha Brown, Rachid Ouramdane, Hetain Patel, Thomas Hauert, Alexander Whitley and Jérôme Bel. He choreographed the solo performances QUASI (2010) and #Boomerang (2019), and the collective pieces In One Breath (2009) and Time Massage (2017). He also co-created Le Pays où tout est à prendre au sérieux (2019) with Virginie Combet, presented at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
In 2019, Andrew directed a version of The Rite of Spring for the Festival de Marseille, as part of Alain Platel’s Sacre XXL project. In the same year, he was invited by the Russian director Vera Martynov to co-direct the video installation Omorfoi and help to design an exhibition of Russian ceramics in Moscow and Hanoi for the Hermitage Foundation. In October 2020, he was invited by the Manifesta13 Biennale to develop a programme of inclusive activities as part of the Aoziz network, a group of inclusive organisations based in Marseille.
Following the success of The Rite of Spring in 2019, Andrew Graham se up the company L’Autre Maison in Marseille devoted to inclusive choreography. The company consolidates his expertise, acquired over a decade, in broadening participation in the arts, and embodies his special ability to work with groups of disabled and non-disabled dancers. This practice is anchored in the development of new ways of representing our ways of living through movement, both together and alone, via original performances and new methods of intervention.
Within the company there is the Mixability collective founded in 2019 by Andrew Graham and Marion Di Majo in partnership with the Festival de Marseille. Comprising 27 disabled and non-disabled dancers of different ages and with different experiences of dance, the collective has created a new inclusive space for dance where new interactions can arise and where each individual explores, exists and evolves through movement. With the help of Andrew Graham, they develop a practice and a choreographic language that are specific to the bodies and aspirations of the group’s members.
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Béatrice Pedraza has twenty years’ experience as a director and specialises in providing support and training for vulnerable individuals. As joint founder and director of the association Les Arteliers, for seven years she developed inclusive theatre workshops for disabled performers. For the past ten years, Béatrice has devoted her time to theatre workshops in community centres. In 2017 she set up the Arthalie Collective and works with l’Atelier de Mars on support and theatre programmes for the disabled. Arthalie provides a stage production platform for independent disabled people. This non-institutional artistic experiment makes them feel less isolated and allows them to take part in the artistic, social and cultural life of the city. Béatrice facilitates this policy of openness by making it possible for the twenty members of the collective to take part in public performances. Participants are thus able to experience new spaces for self-expression. The collective is open to all and encourages artistic expression among people living with all kinds of physical or mental disability.
Join the company for the show Parade
Born in 1991, Martin Poncet began working as a sound designer for the performing arts in 2009. From 2009 to 2017 he studied performing arts at Metz University and sound design at ENSATT in Lyon. In parallel with his training he took part in some thirty projects in the performing arts (performance, theatre and dance), exhibitions, radio and video. A passionate advocate of dialogue between different techniques, styles and media, he is very interested in building a relationship with the audience via storytelling. Since he graduated, attracted by sound in all its guises and by the “live” dimension of artworks, he has worked on numerous performance and music projects.
The technological creations of Franco-Moroccan artist Mounir Ayache (born 1991) encourage us to look at the political and social realities of the Arab world in a new light. Using the codes of science fiction, which he combines with family histories and an imaginative reappropriation of Arab experiences and identities, Mounir Ayache is part of the unofficial movement known as Arabfuturism, inspired by the Afrofuturism of the 1990s. These movements use fiction to offer alternative stories and realities. Mounir Ayache uses what he ironically refers to as an “Oriental SF aesthetic” to mimic representations of the Other and the Foreigner in western fiction. In addition to the codes and rhetoric of science fiction, he uses new technologies to convey his ideas, blurring the frontiers between contemporary art and entertainment.
