There was also a shift in culture in a broader sense. I was an activist for the place of homosexuals in society, you can’t imagine what France was like in the ’60s and ’70s. When Mitterrand came in, that repression disappeared. People don’t understand the enormous advances that came with the arrival of the Socialists
Was your vision for the festival international from the outset?
For the first years, it was very important to show all the work that was part of the new blossoming of French dance. But aesthetically it was the American postmodernists who captivated me. The public had to learn about all this. You have to have courage in the face of the public. If people don’t understand at first, that doesn’t matter. When Merce Cunningham first came here in 1985, people were shouting, “go learn to dance from Bejart.” But when we presented Cunningham’s “Ocean” in a 6,000-seat theater in 1998, it was packed, and a summit in my career.
The festival programming has often reflected your life. You focused strongly over the years on Arab and Middle Eastern cultures, for example.
Between 1990 and 1992, I really took the festival in my own hands. The 1992 festival, “The Mediterranean, My Mother,” was based on the idea of the exclusion of both Jews and Arabs from Spain in 1492. It was about exile, identity, exclusion, immigration, the rise of nationalisms, all these things that concern us so deeply still.
It was a huge moment for me. Later, there were many other strong links to my own life in the festival; I think that was part of its vitality. When you look around you [he gestured at his spartan apartment], you can see my real life is in the festival office.
What changes have you seen in contemporary dance over the decades?
Everything is accepted and mixed up now. You can have krump in Rameau’s “Les Indes Galantes” and it works brilliantly, or [Mourad] Merzouki doing choreography for synchronized swimming. Millions of people will watch breaking during the Olympics.
Read More: The Godfather of French Contemporary Dance Passes the Torch
