Born in Maubeuge in 1986, in a family where dance circulated like a familiar language, Sofiane Chalal stepped on stage at a very early age. Trained in hip-hop and shaped by battles, competitions, and the major figures of urban cultures, he developed a singular physicality—dense, precise, embodied—that soon led him to international stages.
From 2015 onward, he entered the field of contemporary creation as a performer and gradually asserted his own artistic voice.
He founded Compagnie Chaabane and premiered Ma part d’ombre in 2022, a solo work that has become a defining milestone in his career and has already toured more than 150 times.
This double lineage—the raw energy of hip-hop and the dramaturgical depth of contemporary dance—forms the core of his writing today.
Sofiane Chalal is part of a generation of choreographers who are redefining the boundaries of the dancing body.
In his work, each movement carries the world within it: its weight, its breath, its resistances, its flashes of light.
His pieces navigate the shifting terrain where strength meets fragility, where humour brushes against gravity.
What distinguishes him is his way of engaging dance as an act of repair: a space where the body—so often confined or reduced to its appearance—can reclaim symbolic, physical, and sensorial power.
With XXL, he extends this research to five performers with singular trajectories and physicalities, united by a shared energy of presence, virtuosity, and lightness.
The piece questions how our societies shape the gaze directed at bodies, and how the stage can become a place of transformation rather than judgment.
Sofiane Chalal’s work is not about inclusion or claims; it is about encounter—encounter with other bodies, other imaginaries, other audiences, in France and internationally—where norms shift and sensibilities evolve.
Through his creations, he invents a dance that unsettles perception, opens new possibilities, and affirms movement as a space of freedom.
He is an associate artist at Le Manège, Maubeuge — Scène nationale transfrontalière.
Since 2025, he has been supported by SUN — United Stages of the North, International Center for Production and Touring in Hauts-de-France.