The 20th anniversary of the Black Blanc Beur company provided an opportunity to present the unique approach of the choreographer Christine Coudun and her artistic project firmly rooted in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. Interviews, rehearsals and extracts of performances contribute to the analysis of work of international standing, resulting from innovative research into hip hop vocabulary but which “goes beyond its specificity to attain a more universal dimension”.

Défilles (2001) is a duo of young breakdancing women challenging with humour and femininity the male-dominated world surrounding them, to the music of DJ Mouss. Break Quintet (2002), a choreography for five dancers, stages with derision a group of young male holidaymakers in a hostile land. Si je t'M (2004), a work for eight dancers, questions the male-female relationship avoiding stereotypes by introducing a work of contact into the gestures. Christine Coudun includes in group compositions the different elements of the virtuoso vocabulary of break dance and a large mobility of action in space. By opting for “future memories”, taken from the inner cities and immigration, she opened up a totally new path. By devoting herself to the draft of gestures and attentive to the dancers’ extraordinary improvisation talents, she focused on the meaning of the gestures contained in movement to bring them back to the choreography.

Source : Fabienne Arvers

Today, the contemporary hip hop mix surprises no-one and even barely deserves special mention in programmes. We’re no longer surprised to see break dance at the Avignon Festival, at the Maison de la Danse de Lyon or at most national venues. What we don’t know, is that probably none of this would have happened without the Black Blanc Beur company. An historic company in France, ever since their first production (dantesque, with forty dancers!) on the car park of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines in 1984, Black Blanc Beur, directed by Christine Coudun and Jean Djemad, has always been a trendsetter. The company was thus the first to invite choreographers of other disciplines to create for it, the first to order original musical creations without rap being obligatory, the first to try out multi-cultural mixes and to open hip hop out to other influences and, above all, the first to demand an art scene for this new form of dance.