[Portrait to read in the winter issue of têtu· magazine, available at your newsstands or by subscription.] After having made the world’s biggest stars dance, Nicolas Huchard turns to musical theatre: he choreographs The Legend of Monte-Cristo, the new musical show opening on January 27 at the Dôme de Paris.
Photographie : Matthieu Croizier for têtu·
Madonna, Lady Gaga, Angèle, Aya Nakamura… Nicolas Huchard’s trophy cabinet is well established: at 37, the French choreographer has made the biggest names dance, whether on stage or in their music videos. He needed a new challenge worthy of his career; this is done, as he was entrusted with designing the choreography for The Legend of Monte-Cristo, the new event musical presented at the Dôme de Paris from January 27, 2025, and then touring across France.
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An adventure that did not come easy: “I spent a long time avoiding musicals, he confides with a small smile when we meet for coffee in the city’s 20th arrondissement. I attended a dance school where we studied mainly this genre, and I must say I quickly got fed up with it!” If this project rekindled his love for musical theatre, it is first because his affection for the work of Alexandre Dumas does not date from last year’s triumph of Monte Cristo’s film adaptation, with Pierre Niney in the title role. It is also because he was given carte blanche on the entire dance portion of the show.
Nicolas Huchard and Dance
First and foremost, three days of intensive auditions were needed to find the eight artists who would carry it. “I have a lot of criteria, he admits. Beyond technique, they must be able to learn the movements quickly and retain precise directives that can change rapidly; it requires a strong capacity for adaptation.” Not neglecting the human side, which matters in a troupe’s life: “It is essential that these are open-minded people who want to share months or years with the same group. For a solitary person, this kind of project would be difficult.” For him, then, once the casting is settled, to adapt in turn to the dancers selected: “I ask them a lot of questions, and I draw on their experiences to create, because it is impossible to relay an emotion to an audience if you have not already felt it.”
That commitment to dialogue, and more broadly to the expression of feelings, he owes to his family, in which he grew up in Les Ulis, Essonne. “I am very close to my mother, to my brothers and sisters. We spend a lot of time together,” he confides. “I have always felt enveloped in love and benevolence within the family cocoon”. Moreover, it is with his family that he learned to love dance. “They were moments of gathering where we had fun, we laughed, we communicated through movement”, he recalls. Unlike his brothers who are passionate about football, the young Nicolas preferred ballet. “I needed to set myself apart from them”, he recounts today.
An admirable way, by the way, to defy the injunctions of a rigid, compartmentalized and suffocating masculinity. “I never felt aligned with the definition of man that society gave me, he explains. Today, I manage to step back from these pressures around virility and I would even say that it inspires me.” A source, perhaps, to feed a show about his own story: “The next step is to be able to tell my story.”
