Hip-Hop's Cultural Capital

In January 2017, the hip-hop dance festival Suresnes Cités Danse celebrated its twenty-fifth year. At the Saturday afternoon ‘gala’ performance of the opening weekend, festival director Olivier Meyer takes the microphone before the curtain to introduce the show: 25 dancers aged 20–50, representing three generations of hip-hop. He announces the presence in the audience of two well-known hip-hoppers from the first generation of dancers: Mourad Merzouki and Kader Attou – both now directors of national choreographic centres in France, whose careers flourished with the support of programmes like Suresnes Cités. These self-taught dance artists with ‘the wrong names’, subject to discrimination territoriale, are now professional choreographers and respected fonctionnaires creating artworks with the support of the state.

Mourad Merzouki smiles as he walks up the aisle of the elegant theatre, basking in the audience's acknowledgement. But where is Kader Attou? ‘I don't know if Kader is here at the moment’, says Olivier Meyer at the microphone. I too am looking for Kader Attou. Over the previous months, he has not replied to my requests for an interview, and although his assistant has sent me many messages, none has facilitated contact with the choreographer. He has been on tour internationally, then back in La Rochelle in rehearsal, then briefly in Paris on his way somewhere else. It is clear that Kader Attou is very busy – developing work, touring work, training dancers. Like Mourad Merzouki, he is ‘somebody’ in the landscape of French hip-hop dance, now an established part of French contemporary choreography produced on the big national stages.

This red velvet Théâtre Jean Vilar might seem far from the origins of hip-hop, which was first practised in the 1980s in the French cités, shopping centres, and the lobbies of buildings with smooth floors favoured by young amateur dancers. But as the civic theatre of a long-time communist Paris suburb with rigorous social programming, it has been engaged with connecting hip-hoppers to professional choreographers and giving them a stage for their own compositions. Hip-hop's original mission, to bring youth into dance as a community practice, did not end when dancers like Merzouki and Attou developed choreography that by 1999 was touring to represent France abroad.