Festival Karavel 19

Festival Karavel 19 at Radiant-Bellevue

At Radiant-Bellevue, we are delighted to welcome Festival Karavel 19, a flagship gathering that continues to elevate hip-hop dance within the wider performing arts landscape. Our stage in Caluire-et-Cuire has long been a home for artists who challenge boundaries, and this 19th edition of the festival arrives with the vibrant energy of a scene in constant reinvention. Driven by a spirit of openness and discovery, Festival Karavel 19 brings together seasoned performers and rising talents, offering audiences a panorama of styles that ranges from explosive footwork to refined musicality and theatrical nuance. The festival’s current momentum is palpable: new creations, fresh collaborations, and a redoubled commitment to education and transmission reaffirm its role as a catalyst for contemporary movement. For our audiences, this means an evening of living choreography where precision, risk, and poetry share the spotlight. Our venue’s technical environment—generous stage lines, crystalline sound, and versatile lighting—supports the intricate textures of hip-hop, from percussive breaths and floorwork to subtle gestures and narrative transitions. Hosting Festival Karavel 19 reflects our mission to champion artists who illuminate the present while sketching the future of dance.

On our stage: rhythm, risk, and community

What unfolds at Radiant-Bellevue during Festival Karavel 19 is more than a succession of numbers: it’s a dramaturgy of styles and sensibilities that captures the urgency and the generosity of hip-hop. Expect to see the precision of popping, the elasticity of house, the theatrical electricity of locking and waacking, and the raw, sculptural power of breaking—all in dialogue with scenographic invention and refined musical design. Some works embrace abstraction; others weave stories, humor, and personal testimony into movement that speaks across generations. The festival’s artistic team nurtures this diversity, inviting choreographers who expand the field with hybrid aesthetics, cinematic soundscapes, or live, beat-driven scores. In our hall, audiences benefit from intimate sightlines that bring them close to the performers’ craft—the breath before a jump, the micro-timing that anchors a groove, the moment when a solo opens into a collective wave. Around the performance, Festival Karavel’s spirit of exchange often continues in encounters with artists, school initiatives, and workshops that anchor the event in our local community. This is hip-hop as a shared language: virtuosic, generous, and accessible.

Festival Karavel 19 also underscores a crucial evolution in the ecosystem: artists who started in battles now craft full-length works able to hold a large stage with dramaturgical clarity and visual richness. As a hosting venue, we are proud to support this maturation by providing a technical frame that encourages risk-taking and nuance—dynamic lighting to sculpt bodies in motion, spatial configurations that let groups expand and contract like breathing organisms, and acoustics that carry both bass-driven momentum and delicate sonic detail. The festival’s pathway through the region finds a pivotal echo at Radiant-Bellevue, where audiences gather to experience a curated cross-section of the current scene, from emerging voices to established companies refining their signature vocabularies. Each appearance in Festival Karavel 19 is a promise of encounter: between tradition and innovation, street and stage, personal memory and collective celebration. We invite spectators to lean into that encounter—to feel the pulse of a form that keeps reinventing itself, and to discover how the artists of this edition transform technical mastery into living emotion right here, in the heart of our theatre.