Jean-Paul Montanari’s career as the head of Montpellier Danse has been entwined with the rise of contemporary dance as a force in France.
“But is he really leaving?”
Even after Jean-Paul Montanari announced in March that he would retire as director of Montpellier Danse, the summer festival, which he has led for 41 years, the question persisted, half-humorously, in dance circles.
Montanari has been threatening to retire forever — “this is perhaps my last festival,” he would often say in melancholy tones — but he is so closely identified with Montpellier Danse that it’s hard to imagine the festival without his monklike silhouette, his half-amused smile and occasional caustic asides.
But he really is leaving.
“I’ve come to the end of that road,” Montanari, 76, said, speaking in French in an interview in his small, spare apartment near the Montpellier railway station. “I have done everything I wanted, and it is the right moment to find a new history for Montpellier Danse.”
Montanari’s career has been entwined with the explosion of contemporary dance into a major art form in France. The Montpellier festival was founded in 1981 by the choreographer Dominique Bagouet, who asked Montanari, then working in theater, to come and help him. (Bagouet died of AIDS in 1992, at 41.) It was the year of François Mitterrand’s Socialist Party victory in national elections, and the beginnings of a new cultural policy of decentralization, presided over by the culture minister Jack Lang. The effect on dance would be enormous.
Regional choreographic centers were established all over France, the first in Montpellier, presided over by Bagouet. Each was headed by a choreographer, benefiting from a permanent company, rehearsal space, technical support and ample funding. The result was an explosion of movement languages and aesthetics, a vibrant touring network and a new legitimacy for a formerly marginalized form.
“Montanari obviously benefited from the explosion of dance in the 1980s, but dance also benefited from him,” said Philippe Noisette, the dance critic of Les Echos. “He understood dance was a young art, alive and cool, that could give a youthful, dynamic image to the city, and was able to convince the politicians, particularly the mayor of Montpellier, Georges Freche, of that and keep that support for decades.
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