Since his first solo choreography Aatt enen tionon (1996), choreographer and dancer Boris Charmatz (Chambéry, 1973) has made a name for himself as a dance innovator. Charmatz was classically trained at the École de Danse in Paris and the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse in Lyon. In 1992, he founded the group Association Edna together with Dimitri Chamblas, and made his dance debut with À bras-le-corps (1993). Since then, alongside dance performances, he has also produced improvisation art, installations, films, performances in public spaces, excursions and conceptual exhibitions.

In 2008, he was appointed artistic director of the Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne, which he renamed the Musée de la danse a year later. The productions of this 'museum in movement' have been performed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (Musée de la danse: Three Collective Gestures, 2013) and the Tate Modern in London (If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse?). Charmatz has also established himself as a writer and dance theorist. A number of his essays were published as a collection titled 'Je suis une école' in 2009, and he is the co-author of undertraining / On A Contemporary Dance (2011, with Isabelle Launay) and Emails 2009-2010 (2013, and with Jérôme Bel). In 2011, he was artiste associé at the Festival d'Avignon. 

Charmatz employs a radical approach in order to discover and transmit new forms of dance and to reflect on this art form. Such as in 50 years of dance, a high-speed run-through of the oeuvre of Merce Cunningham, the great master of dance (Holland Festival, 2010). Or in enfant (Holland Festival, 2011), a confrontational performance about the vulnerability of children, in which his dancers manipulate the bodies of 26 children - as vulnerable obstacles. Aside from a busy tour schedule, Charmatz enjoys improvising with other performing artists, such as poet and hiphop innovator Saul Williams, saxophonist Archie Shepp and trumpeter Médéric Collignon. As a performer, he can often be seen in works by artists such as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Tino Sehgal. In 2015, he exhibited manger, probably his most radical work to date, at the Holland Festival. danse de nuit premiered in 2016 at the La Bâtie-Festival de Genève.