Josef Nadj is a choreographer, director, visual artist and photographer born in Vojvodina, former Yugoslavia, and based in France. Since founding his company in 1986, he has developed a highly distinctive artistic language that moves between dance, theatre, visual art and literature, often drawing inspiration from the landscapes, histories and cultural memory of Central Europe. His breakthrough works, including Canard Pékinois, La Mort de l’Empereur, Woyzeck and Les Philosophes, established him as one of the most singular voices of European contemporary performance. His creations have been presented at major international venues and festivals, including the Festival d’Avignon, Venice Biennale, Festival de Cannes and ImPulsTanz. From 1995 to 2016, Nadj worked as a director of the National Choreographic Centre in Orléans, France. Throughout his career, he has collaborated across artistic disciplines and generations, creating an influential body of work recognised for its poetic imagery, physical precision and deep engagement with questions of identity, memory and transformation.
Canard pekinois (1987) was the debut work of Josef Nadj, a dancer and choreographer born in the small town of Kanjiža in Vojvodina. Josef Nadj, who, throughout his 30-year career, has been working and living between France, Hungary and Serbia, wanted to explore the possibility of existence on the boundary between life and death, where death is considered to be the gateway to the world of nothingness. The famous piece that has toured around the world was reinvented by Nadj and the dancers of En–Knap Group. For Nadj, the revival of this piece represents an end to a thirty-year cycle. It is an opportunity to return to the beginning of his career and rethink the origins of his artistic expression. Working with the dancers of En–Knap Group gave him the opportunity to isolate a specific motive from the original work and develop a variation of this theme that will serve him as the basis for the new performance.
The performance is part of a double bill that looks back to the 1980s through two exceptional works: Canard Pekinois/Dark Union and Set and Reset/Reset, created with Kathleen Fisher of Trisha Brown Dance Company. Both works played a significant role in shaping contemporary dance as we know it today.