Laurent Chétouane
Laurent Chétouane, born in Soyaux, France in 1973, is one of the most controversial directors of the German theater and original artists of the contemporary dance.
After studying engineering, he completed a program in theater studies at the Paris Sorbonne and theater directing at Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt/M. Since the late 1990s, Chétouane came to develop an unmistakable style. In his theater works, he upends our habits of vision for the long term by presenting texts, gestures, and movement consciously and as if under the control of another. Since 2006, Chétouane has worked as a choreographer. With his Tanzstücken #1-#4, a second line emerged in his work dealing with the necessity and meaning of movement. In his performance Hommage an das Zaudern (2011) he reduces events to a zero point where gestures of questioning draw their arresting power from the shadow side of the deed. To develope his choreographic work Chétouane collaborates on a regular basis with the dancers Matthieu Burner, Joris Camelin, Sigal Zouk and others. For Tanzstück #1: Bildbeschreibung by Heiner Müller Chétouane received the Wild Card of RUHR.2010 and that same year was awarded the Förderpreis des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen. In 2012, Chétouane staged Kleist's Erdbeben von Chili at Schauspiel Köln and the Rihm project Auf Kolonos at Staatstheater Karlsruhe.
He has taught as guest professor at the Institut für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft Gießen (Direction: Heiner Goebbels) and Freie Universität Berlin and has also taught in Oslo, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Leipzig, and Bochum. From 2012 on Chétouane is Artistic Director of the masters programme dramaturgy at the Institut für Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaft at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt/M. (Direction: Nikolaus Müller-Schöll).