dance in france

Dance in France

Dance in France is a project which is linked to the Fête de la Musique - an annual day of free music held in Paris each year on 21st June - (the day of the summer solstice). Fête de la Musique, organised by the French Ministry for Culture, is an international celebration of music and dance, designed to encourage both amateur and professional performers, dancers and entertainers to all join together on the streets of Paris, with hundreds of musicians gathering in the parks, cafés and public spaces of Paris, to give free performances and concerts throughout the city. In June 2009 Eastside, working in partnership with Magic Window Paris, took a group of young people that had been working on a dance project in London, via the Eurostar, to France where they took part in a cultural exchange with a group of teenage dancers from Paris. The London students worked with young people from the Collège Rochefoucauld and Sevres College in Paris. The groups from France and the UK worked together bi-lingually and collaborated on a series of physical theatre exercises as well as choreographing a joint anglo-french hip-hop dance performance designed to showcase the energy and talent of its young participants. Both groups spent a weekend working and rehearsing together and the project culminated with a public performance at the Rebel Music Xplicit (RMX) Recording Studios in Poissonnière. The young dancers from London also performed alongside professional French musicians and Parisian street performers, outside the famous Centre de Pompidou (Pompidou Centre), near the Marais and in the relaxed atmosphere of the Fête de la Musique, they explored the music and entertainment on the streets of Paris - 'The City of Light'.