Cinq versions de Don Juan

For forty years, I have been developing a very particular choreographic approach.
Forty years of creations, encounters, transmission, and training with young people and professionals.
I have taken immense pleasure in directing my company throughout these years—whether through my own projects or through programs created in close collaboration with French and international choreographers.

Having founded in Provence an International Choreographic Center for Youth, I will now devote myself entirely to children and teenagers.
To close this magnificent chapter with my professional company, I am creating a singular choreographic work bringing together the classical, contemporary, and hip-hop dancers who have shaped the brightest moments of Grenade. With them, I am creating FIVE VERSIONS OF DON JUAN: a final opus of Compagnie Grenade in five tableaux.
Five possible perspectives—each contemporary, none definitive—on the inherently multifaceted myth of Don Juan, reflecting and pursuing the shifts in our times, the upheavals in relationships between men and women, and vice versa.

Classical, contemporary, and hip-hop dancers will take turns speaking in the company’s hybrid language.
Our intention is to gather and sublimate all the work carried out over so many years, rooted in Grenade’s founding principles. Once again—like a fruit scattering its seeds—Grenade multiplies into a thousand garnets through hybridity, energy, emotion, madness, and sharing.

Josette Baïz — September 2025

WHY TAKE AN INTEREST IN DON JUAN?

Molière in 1665, and Mozart a century later, both caused scandal.
A familiar stereotype yet an intriguing work, the story has continually challenged social, moral, and romantic codes.
A great unscrupulous seducer, a libertine nobleman, a liar, manipulator, profaner, and hypocrite who mocks women and never keeps his promises—he seeks only immediate pleasure and perpetual change. Nothing about him is simple; he embodies excess in all its forms.

And yet, he ultimately carries within him a certain ethic. He may break the rules, but he is free and defiant! He asserts his own law, guided only by his own thinking. Knowing himself to be mortal and insignificant, he rejects all limits and respects nothing: neither religious values, nor the moral order, nor science.

Is it not fascinating to stand so completely apart from society’s value systems and create a different grammar of life?

In this choreographic work, each act offers an interpretation of Don Juan’s values, beliefs, desires, and contradictions.
The initial cards are reshuffled; the logic of the game is not quite the same; the endings remain open… all within a global narrative that can, if one chooses, still be read chronologically.

Version I — EXCESS
A classical version. Three dancers portray Don Juan, the wandering nobleman; Sganarelle, his critical servant; and Elvira, recently wed and immediately abandoned. A fine thread runs through the dramatic progression; this major trio will return later to illuminate the evolution of the characters.

Version II — REBELLION
Multiple Don Juans—rebellious, antisocial, defiant—driven by a rap/rock score that builds a tense, powerful, and vehement energy in a future as violent as it is dark.

Version III — FREEDOM
What if Don Juan were a woman—reversal or revolution?
Here, an internalized yet powerful eroticism unfolds through supple, textured bodies blending Oriental and Indian dance with krump.

Version IV — DEATH
A Don Juan at the gates of hell. Attacked in turn by all his victims and punished by Heaven, yet remaining true to himself until his final breath.

Version V — METAMORPHOSES
What if the consuming fire were not an ending or a call to repentance, but a threshold—a passage into radical transformation?
A Don Juan delivered, evolving in the beyond, transformed and freed from his past.