The Musée d'Orsay is tuning in to the Cultural Olympiad and the Olympic Games. With just nine months to go, the Parisian institution is entering the fray of "art and sport" events, which are poised to become the theme of the season for many venues and events. "We will be at the heart of the plan with the construction of a stadium on Place de la Concorde which will host basketball, skateboarding and breaking," said Antonine Fulla, director of cultural programming and auditoriums at the Musée d'Orsay. The opening ceremony on the Seine will pass right in front of our premises. It seemed only natural to participate in our own way."

With breaking, an acrobatic hip-hop style appearing for the first time at the Olympic Games, the entire urban dance scene is enjoying a media boost. Until June 22, a series of shows and walkabouts will punctuate the exhibitions. On Saturday, November 11, and Sunday, November 12, star choreographer Mourad Merzouki, whose Kalypso festival runs until December 23 in 23 towns and cities across the Paris region, takes over various spaces. "It's the first time – for Mourad– that we are holding a so-called 'open museum', offering him every possible venue for him to cross through," said Fulla. "Between 2 and 6 pm, the 13,000 visitors expected on average each day will be able to enjoy choreographic pastilles, according to their mood, scattered throughout the museum."

From the imposing and majestic grand nave, where a cable and elastic bands have been installed for aerial sequences from the show Vertikal, to the Salle des fêtes, gleaming in its crystal chandeliers (which can be entered exceptionally to see the baroque Folia), to the Fumoir with its square of tables conducive to free improvisations, 10 venues will serve as the setting for some 10 excerpts from five shows by Merzouki. "These are, as it were, singular scenographies that you have to live up to, and for which dance can provide a new reading," he commented.

In front of Gustave Courbet's monumental and always breathtaking painting Le Rut du printemps. Combat de cerfs, Merzouki embeds a compact block from Boxe Boxe, created in 2010, as well as on the immense model of the Paris Opéra neighborhood, installed at the rear of the nave. The transparent glass floor is transformed into an astonishing, vertiginous natural base for a surge of bodies between stage and ring. At the age of 7, the dancer and choreographer born in Saint-Priest near Lyon was first introduced to martial arts, then circus techniques, before discovering hip-hop three years later.

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