Skip to main content
Back to search
  • Add to playlist

Absalon the Insurgent

Asbalon l’Insurgé is a summarising work, grouping those obsessions that are more or less identifiable in several of my major works. It merges the idea of extreme physical commitment linked to a political meaning. And there is suffering at the same time: that pain that I feel when I look at society. 

Commitment, commitment.

In this work, I wanted to reconnect with a choreography that is both radical and totally synthetic in its construction. A work that produces meaning through gesture.

Brumachon, Claude

Claude Brumachon was born in 1959, in Rouen. After attending Fine Arts where drawing directed him down the path of bodies, he took up dance at the age of seventeen with « les Ballets de la Cité » led by Catherine Atlani, he stayed there for two years.

In 1981, Claude Brumachon met Benjamin Lamarche in Paris, they immediately started a collaborative and original research. Together, they explored that new world opening up through the dancing body.

Claude Brumachon between 1980 and 1983, as for him, worked with Christine Gérard (La Pierre Fugitive), Karine Saporta and Brigitte Farges.

As they belonged to no school in particular and as they rejected none, Claude and Benjamin sealed their agreement with a first duet : Niverolles Duo du col in 1982.

With their first group, the « Rixes » company in 1984, they invented a stylized, vehement and passionate choreographic writing: a sharp and brisk gesture, a tormented tenderness. They surrounded themselves with dancers, a composer, a makeup artist and a costume designer: Founding a troupe and leading it to creation.

In four years’ time, the choreographer created ten plays with two major ones (1988): Texane (award-winning at the Bagnolet contest) and Le Piédestal des vierges which set their style to a recognizable gesture. It quickly followed on sequences of cleat-cut and sharp movements cutting the body and the space.

The choreographer carved out a reputation. In 1989, Folie came to the fore and was a great success again. That success has been repeated 7 years later in 1996, with Icare (presented at the 50th Festival d’Avignon), a solo written for Benjamin Lamarche.

Sometimes groping, sometimes rushing headlong, Claude Brumachon and Benjamin Lamarche imagine and create new worlds. There‘s never any doubt between them, doubts are about dancing, about the ways of dancing, about the continuing questioning of this moving body the mind is obsessed with.

The teaching of their dance is made through training, lessons are made as much to pass on this brand new knowledge as to refine it. Moments to unite the group under a common body language. To understand is also to make understand.

As an expression of desire – passionate – and of an overflowing sensuality to a certain point that it was sometimes described as violent, their plays are tales of the inexpressible, they are mirrors of raging inner worlds, pushed beyond their own rules. Claude Brumachon and Benjamin Lamarche have become researchers in poetic and powerful movements. They’ve been creating a dance alternately full of energy and tormented, lyric and passionate, now high-spirited and romantic and now down to earth and meaningful.

Out of Molière’s wanderings, they made with Histoire d’Argan le Visionnaire (2007) a bright and facetious show as a tribute to the artist. Out of the consumer society, they made a Festin (2004), carnal and sensual where proximity bursts out at the face of the audience. With Phobos (2007), they ventured into irrational, universal or shallow fears.

Claude and Benjamin create from the body for the body and with the body.

Their dances are as much stories of different groups that share a space to live in as they are stories of loneliness facing the world. They all are a research around an irrational gesture that calls for the precise one, necessary and full of meaning.

A gesture, heavy with an unspeakable story that changes into the very moment and, in a sometimes bitter statement, offers a view of man in his complexity.

Claude Brumachon signed more than eighty original choreographies with his own dancers, dancers from other French or foreign ballets, with schools and with children as well.

They directed the National Choreographic Centre of Nantes to the creation in 1992 to 2015. Since January 1, 2016 they continue their choreographic road with their new company SOUS LA PEAU.


Source : Brumachon-Lamarche


More information :

https://www.brumachon-lamarche.fr/

Gauducheau, François

François Gauducheau was born in Nantes. After studying Letters and spending a year as an aid worker in Africa, he moved to Paris and began documentary production at ORTF. From 1970 to 1980, he produced a number of films, including for the show “Le Jour du Seigneur": France, Africa, India, Asia: the subjects are varied with strong social and human accents. At the start of the 80s, he joined the company Vidéo 44, which produces numerous institutional films, mainly for local communities. A few years later, he created GF. Production, his own company that enables him to both direct and to explore the world of documentaries once again. In 1997, he created the Association des Producteurs Audiovisuels de Pays de la Loire and sold his company to the group Her-bak. Since then, François Gauducheau has produced numerous documentaries for television. He works with regional production companies: Pois-chiche films, 24 Images, Odysséus Productions, Plan Large, Aligal, Aber images, etc. In 2008, with a few close friends he created a non-profit company, Primavista, which does testing, recording of artistic performances and short films with its own recording and editing equipment. Since July 2010, he has been a member of the board of directors of Association Télénantes, which develops future local Nantes television programming for presentation to the CSA (Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel).


Source : François Gauducheau 's website


More information :

francoisgauducheau.fr

Absalon l'Insurgé

Choreography : Claude Brumachon

Choreography assistance : Benjamin Lamarche, Vincent Blanc

Interpretation : Grérory Alliot, Steven Chotard, Lise Fassier, Elisabetta Gareri, Julien Grosvalet, Benjamin Lamarche, Martin Mauriès, Valérie Soulard, Sabrina Vicari

Additionnal music : Steve Reich, ZonK'T, Carl Orff, Jean-Sébastien Bach

Lights : Olivier Tessier

Costumes : Claude Brumachon et les danseurs

Production / Coproduction of the choreographic work : Centre Chorégraphique National de Nantes

Our videos suggestions
03:00

D.opa! [Dopamines of post-Athenians]

Apergi, Patricia (Greece)

  • Add to playlist
05:56

All the misery in the world

  • Add to playlist
05:32

Sing Sing

Carlès, James (France)

  • Add to playlist
05:55

Dance, if you want to enter my country!

Matsune, Michikazu (France)

  • Add to playlist
02:39

The spectator's moment (2017): Cirkus Cirkör

  • Add to playlist
01:48

The spectator's moment (2015): Kyle Abraham

Abraham, Kyle (France)

  • Add to playlist
01:09:57

TAKING STEPS

Winkler, Christoph (Germany)

  • Add to playlist
01:36:33

DANCE IS NOT ENOUGH

Winkler, Christoph (Germany)

  • Add to playlist
02:13

The spectator's moment (2015): Bill T. Jones

Jones, Bill T. (France)

  • Add to playlist
02:02

The spectator's moment (2021): Maguy Marin

Marin, Maguy (France)

  • Add to playlist
02:41

The Spectator's Moment (2022): Gregory Maqoma

Maqoma, Gregory Vuyani (France)

  • Add to playlist
01:55

Etude Révolutionnaire

Duncan, Isadora (France)

  • Add to playlist
26:09

Songook Yaakaar

Acogny, Germaine (Senegal)

  • Add to playlist
02:14

The Spectator's moment (2017): Aïcha M'Barek et Hafiz Dhaou

M'Barek, Aïcha (France)

  • Add to playlist
01:14:54

El Djoudour, the roots

Lagraa, Abou (France)

  • Add to playlist
06:08

Waxtaan

Acogny, Germaine (Senegal)

  • Add to playlist
02:54

Waxtaan

Acogny, Germaine (Senegal)

  • Add to playlist
07:50

It's going to get worse and worse and worse, my friend

Gruwez, Lisbeth (Belgium)

  • Add to playlist
Our themas suggestions

Yield Variations on dissuasive urban furniture

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

les ballets C de la B and the aesthetic of reality

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

Do you mean Folklores?

Presentation of how choreographers are revisiting Folklore in contemporary creations.

Parcours

fr/en/

Maison de la danse

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

Pantomimes

Presentation of Pantomimes in the different types of dance.

Parcours

fr/en/

MAPS - A EUROPEAN PROJECT FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETAL DANCE FILM

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

The American origins of modern dance: [1930-1950] from the expressive to the abstract

Parcours

fr/en/

Why do I dance ?

Social dances, anti-establishment, protest dances, rhythms or identities, rituals or pleasures... There are a myriad of reasons for dancing and a myriad of points of view. A webdoc to discover, enhanced with extracts from performances and accounts from amateurs... all the right reasons for dancing!

Webdoc

fr/en/

Contemporary techniques

This Parcours questions the idea that contemporary dance has multiples techniques. Different shows car reveal or give an idea about the different modes of contemporary dancer’s formations.

Parcours

fr/en/

Modern Dance and Its American Roots [1900-1930] From Free Dance to Modern Dance

At the dawn of the 20th century, in a rapidly changing West, a new dance appeared: Modern Dance. In the United States as in Europe, modern trends emerge simultaneously and intertwine in thier development. Let's dive into the beginnings of American modern dance!  

Parcours

fr/en/

Dance and percussion

Découvrez de quelles manières ont collaboré chorégraphes et éléments percussifs.

Parcours

fr/en/

The committed artist

In all the arts and here especially in dance, the artist sometimes creates to defend a cause, to denounce a fact, to disturb, to shock. Here is a panorama of some "committed" choreographic creations.

Parcours

fr/en/
By accessing the website, you acknowledge and accept the use of cookies to assist you in your browsing.
You can block these cookies by modifying the security parameters of your browser or by clicking onthis link.
I accept Learn more