Greco and Scholten divide attention between CCN Ballet Nationale de Marseille and ICK Amsterdam

Minister Filipetti has given the green light. Emio Greco and Pieter Scholten will be indeed the new artistic directors of CNN Ballet National de Marseille. A company with 30 dancers, 60 employees in total, in a building with 9 studios and a theatre. Who in the Netherlands still gets that done?

ICKamsterdam declares in a press release that Greco and Scholten will split their time between CNN Marseille and ICK Amsterdam. The two institutions will work together, but no merger will take place. The reportedly hastily drafted and presumably very ambitious plan for CCN Marseille involves building an innovative ballet company based on its own "dance form", and fostering "cross-border talent".

Once upon a time, the phenomenon Centre Choreographique National model for the International Choreographic Arts Centre in Amsterdam. Now the roles have been reversed and the CNN Marseille is likely to be transformed into ICK's model. Besides working on productions and repertoire, there would then be investment in building careers of younger colleagues and in research, transfer of knowledge and education.

The succession has been the subject of heated debate in France debate. After Frédéric Flamand announced his departure last September, French administrators searched for a successor by open tender, as in this blog by Fabien Rivière is beautifully described, including the ad copy.

Greco and Scholten, who in 2012 'Double Points: Extremalism' made with the company in Marseille, and by their own admission built up a good relationship with the entire crew there, went from the longlist to the shortlist and last weekend explained their plans to a 15-member application committee made up of mere directors. They turned out to be favourites.

The former artistic director, the Belgian Frédéric Flamand, already achieved international fame before his appointment in 2004 with Plan K and Charleroi Danses. In recent years, he made large-scale productions in Marseille in collaboration with visual artists and architects such as Ai Wei Wei and Diller&Scofidio. These projects were difficult to tour and cost a lot of money. They also perhaps distracted from the CCN's mission, which may have fuelled calls for change. The choreographers Flamand invited included Lucinda Childs, Olivier Dubois, Emanuel Gat and Yasuyuki Endo.

It now remains to be seen how Greco and Scholten will actually run the dance centres. With the possible relocation to Felix Meritus, the duo has also envisioned a new start-up in Amsterdam. The important question, therefore, seems to be whether they want to continue the combination of small-scale organisation and large-scale effect. Can the much interlinking and networking they are used to in their practice, which is as international as it is Amsterdam-based, be combined with the 'care' of a large group of dancers and a suitcase full of diverse repertoire on standby in Marseille? Or should we see it the other way round: that a Marseille-Amsterdam air bridge is being built to supply the downcast dance climate in the Netherlands with oxygen and energy from a metropolis on the edge of Europe?

Finally, CNN Ballet National de Marseille shares its special housing with the École Nationale Supérieure de Danse de Marseille. The school attracts 120 young dance students every year, who are trained to become professional dancers over nine years. That may be where a whole other project lies ahead.

dp:extremism-trailler, from 2012