The choreographer dancer Amala Dianor has been in view recently, will continue to be in view for some time to come. I reckon it’s his will to get in there and move it. He’s now working through a piece for 32 performers with the exceptional Ballet de l’Opéra national du Rhin (“Ballet du Rhin”) for a premiere in 2026.
In a note titled “de l’ère du « je » à l’aire de jeu” (“from me to us“), for his “Carte Blanche” program at the Maison des Metallos in Paris last December, put Amala Dianor’s creative intentions and outcomes pretty accurately, observing that his spaces are invitingly inclusive, and the movement within them “sophisticated, undulating, fluid, intense, elegant”. Dianor’s choreography, the note concludes, is a “search for self and we-us, for a ground for play”.
I saw Dianor’s work most recently as a hip hop dance “energy” display (Level Up) under the grand dome at Grand Palais. A bit earlier, I had seen his troupe in Gesualdo Passione, a joint project with the antique music company Les Arts Florissants, twining a Baroque church chorale and a hip hop passion play at Philharmonie de Paris, and, not too long before that, with his troupe in Dub, a “fusion ballet” at Théâtre de la Ville- Sarah Bernhardt. Since I wrote about Dub, I’ve been regretting that I didn’t also reference The Dying Swan, Wu Tang Clan, Pina Bausch, Michael Jackson, and, why not? Isadora Duncan. Not because he shares with these icons genres or styles but because he believes so strongly in the power of dance.
I had the privilege of hearing what Dianor has to say twice at the beginning of summer, once during a press conference in early June for the Cadences dance performance festival, coming up in mid-September, and again in early July at an hour-long face-to-face chat to discuss how hip hop fits into today’s dance.
At the press conference Dianor told culture communicators that he “put[s] … [together dance styles] that have nothing to do with each other in a way that [resolves] them as encounters between [performers] bearing the messages of these styles…”
The careful complexity of the remark struck me.
As I understand it, for Dianor, dance performance comes down to an “exchange” (see above: a “search for self and we-us, for a ground for play” between performers). Exchange is also where spectators meet the performance. Exchangegoes also for the creation process. During our chat, Dianor remarked, “When I do a choreography, I follow the idea from the transformation it undergoes in passing through the people who are interpreting it…”.
Centered on what he calls dance “energy” or “liberation”, Dianor is not looking for a form of dance, genre, genres, style or styles. He’s met dance performance and Dance is an exchange of energy and liberation all around. That may be a very hip hop view, I think, but it is certainly Dianor’s considered personal and professional view.
Dianor is a born dancer, recognizes his talent as a gift. Hip hop suits him as a basic practice, he says, because there are so many possibilities for form and style. “You never have it all in hip hop”, he remarks, noting that he is a big fan of Popping, the sudden rhythmic release of contracted muscles that makes movement seem “robotic” and was first popularized by performers such as Michael Jackson.
Amala Dianor says hip hop “has structured” him as a French person.
His family came from Senegal to settle in the 19th arrondissement, where, his parents thought, “everything was dangerous”, so Dianor actually lived in the family living room. Hip hop dance was something he could do as well as seeon the TV.
In doing as well as seeing, Dianor got both a window on the world and a community that taught its members to “think different” as they integrated themselves in the world. Hip hop was “liberation”, “liberty to dress”, that is, to give themselves an identity, and “liberty to learn”, outside of the conservatory, to develop themselves for themselves.
Dianor notes that he and his friends came to think that “America belonged to us. We thought of ourselves as Americans.” When their dance community finally met American hip hoppers, though, they realized that they were, Dianor, says, “ourselves, doing our own form of dance”.
Asked what “liberation” boils down to, Dianor replies, “Energy”.
Coming from hip hop dance and the community he and his fellows had built around it, Dianor’s two years at the Conservatoire nationale de danse contemporaine at Angers, France (Angers CNDC), was both revelation and liberation. Revelation of a new way of looking at dance performance. Energy for a hybrid dance.
Contemporary dance (as a genre), Dianor says, means “moving otherwise”. Hip hop he points out is finely coded, precision is a byword. But contemporary dance is lâcher prise – learning to let the body do the talking, moving from control to “un-control”.
“I completely immersed myself in contemporary dance,” says Dianor, “I would master a new move and the next step was to make it my own,” to create a choreographic language. He was also exposed to other styles and forms at Angers (“I did Butoh. I think it is even more difficult and demanding than hip hop!”).
The experience of contemporary dance energized a hybrid vocabulary for his choreographic vision.
The hip hop and contemporary approaches to dance, as well as the social experiences involved in the one and the other, may be very different, but when they meet, they exchange. “Hip hop is a lot about presence”, about authenticity and aspiration, about “bringing yourself toward the higher place”, Dianor says. But it was on the margins when he came of age.
Contemporary dance allowed him not only to learn a totally new approach to dance but enabled him to move his hip hop-framed aspirations into the mainstream.
Dianor observes that dance performance in general today uses “whatever it can to get the choreographer’s vision done”, so his hip hop language has found new voice in his own dance and in that of his community. “When I returned to my friends after my experience”, he says, they also opened up to new influences.