Filmed in wide shots in a minimalist setting – flames, which also give the stage its only lighting –, Madira Sardancourt throws herself into the lyrical flow of Jacques Brel’s words, while all her dance irradiates this offering of love that nothing, apparently, can burn out. 

This is a song that certainly wasn’t easy to treat. Brel’s universe has penetrated our imagination to such an extent and has so coloured and sublimed our experiences that it could be no simple task to offer an image of it. This perhaps accounts for the simple and unpretentious decision of the choreographer/interpreter and the director. As her alias first name indicates, this French dancer practices Indian dance. She uses the highly codified gestural language of a traditional art to express, here, the words of eternal love.

Source : Fabienne Arvers

Madira Sardancourt has been living and working in Avignon since 1980.

After studying Bharatanatyam, Indian classical dance in Paris for several years, she left for India and worked in Poona under the direction of Prerna Desaï who invited her to dance and, subsequently, to teach. She also studied yoga while she was there. 

Although now resettled in France she has made numerous trips to India and pursues personal research on body language and writing through choreography. She simultaneously explores the world of Indian dance and that of Western contemporary dance. She has initiated a creative approach where gestures of the body, of writing and of the voice are attuned with each other.

Source : Indian dances meeting

The idea has all it takes to please: with the complicity of a director, a choreographer plays along by masterfully setting to dance a melody taken from the repertoire of French song, where, most often, poetry rhymes with humour and tenderness. While none of these dances resembles a video-clip supposed to illustrate the song, they are always an original choreographic proposal. A contemporary version of the old “chansons de geste” (French epic poems), they allow access, in just a few minutes, to the highly diversified universes of the choreographers. Take a song, its verses and its chorus, the interpreter’s tone of voice, the subject or the atmosphere evoked, and see what images, colours, figures and rhythms dance could give them.

Source : Fabienne Arvers