Founded in 1998 by the artists Geisha Fontaine and Pierre Cottreau, Mille Plateaux Associés is a French art structure engaged in choreographic creation, dance research and art theory. The name is as much a reference to the thousand stages (“plateaux” in French) they would like to cross, as it is to also to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
Since the creation of Mille Plateaux Associés, Geisha Fontaine and Pierre Cottreau have created numerous choreographic works that bring together dancers and artists from a variety of artistic fields, including film, visual arts, current music, contemporary music and digital arts, etc.
Each of their projects explores, often with humour, a question the choreographers have no a priori answer for: What makes a good dancer? What is beauty? What is movement? etc.
Each creation is an opportunity to explore new choreographic forms. Rather than a common aesthetic for the choreographers, each project takes on a new form of its own.
Geisha Fontaine and Pierre Cottreau also invest in the cinematographic field, espacially with Millibar, an evolving film composed of sequences shot in several countries since 1999, which has been released in several versions over time.
In addition, Mille Plateaux Associés is involved in the development of choreographic culture: Geisha Fontaine takes part in numerous reflections, discussions and publications on the subject, and hosts many conferences.
The choreographers’ approach is accompanied by artistic and educational initiatives that take shape in a variety of forms: practical workshops and courses, but also participatory projects, raising awareness of choreographic culture, films, and so on. These initiatives are based on a constant concern to link access to dance and its further development to the sharing of art and practices. They are aimed at a wide range of people, with or without regular dance experience: amateurs, dancers, but also people in vulnerable social situations, teachers, etc.