A choreographic extract remodelled by the group Ainsi-Danse, coordinator Armelle Cornillon, as part of the “Danse en amateur et repertoire” programme 2023/2024 (a programme created to assist and promote amateur dancing). Transmission by Claude Brumachon, choreographer, Benjamin Lamarche, assistant, performer
Presented on 15 June 2024, Le Manège de Reims.
The piece when it was created
Folie
Firstly produced 17 November 1989 at L.A.R.C., Centre d’action culturelle, Le Creusot
Choreography: Claude Brumachon
Work for fifteen performers: Mercedes Chanquia, Roxana Del Castillo, Jean-Yves Ginoux, Pascal Guillermie, Boris Jacta, Benjamin Lamarche, Sandrine Lamoine, Yolande Limousin, Anne Minetti, Nick Petit, Véronique Redoux, Fabienne Saint Patrice, Valérie Soulard, Isabelle Tanneau, Sophie Torrion
Music: Christophe Zurfluh
Original duration: 1h
The group
Ainsi-Danse (Villemomble, Île-de-France)
The group Ainsi-Danse brings together amateur and semi-professional dancers from Armelle Cornillon’s company Odela and the Bagnolet conservatory. Its broader project is to revive the memory of the legendary Bagnolet choreography competition: Ballet pour demain. Called Hier c’était demain in tribute to the competition, the project works with French dance heritage from an era when anything seemed possible. It is underpinned by a range of cultural and educational initiatives centred on previous winners the competition. The group chose to stage Folie, a piece created by Claude Brumachon in 1989, one year after he made his winning debut at the competition with the work Texane. 
The project
Originally commissioned by the Val-de-Marne Biennale for the bicentenary of the French Revolution, Folie unleashes its fury right from the beginning with a series of rhythmic respirations. The fifteen bodies on stage seem to have an endless supply of breath and energy. They form a magnificent, ragged horde, propelled into an energetic dance evoking the movements of peoples and women marching for their freedom. A prophetic work, Folie has become an iconic piece of dance repertoire, due to its ongoing resonance. Claude Brumachon and Benjamin Lamarche passed on the work to the group in person. Mindful of the topical nature of the piece, the group practiced regularly in order to learn its singular, powerful, visceral movements.  

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/

La Production Rémoise – Romu DUCROS

Romuald Ducros’ love of photography is a family affair. He was first introduced to photography at a very early age by is father, who was a member of the Bièvre “Club Photo” (founded by André Face). Later it would become both his passion and his profession.  

In 2011, Romuald created Production Rémoise, which specialises in the production of film and photography. His work stands out for its artistic sensibility and creative approach, with each production being a unique work of art.   

His productions range from video capture for performances of dance, theatre, opera and contemporary music, to films touching on sensitive social issues, or celebrating the valuable work of local artisans.  

As an artist-creator, Romuald joined the Leica Akadémie France, while also working on artistic events and exhibitions.

https://www.laproductionremoise.fr/ 

Amateur Dance and Repertory is a companion program to amateur practice beyond the dance class and the technical learning phase. Intended for groups of amateur dancers, it opens a space of sharing for those who wish to deepen a practice and a knowledge of the dance in relation to its history.

Laurent Barré
 Head of Research and Choreographic Directories
Anne-Christine Waibel
 Research Assistant and Choreographic Directories
 +33 (0)1 41 83 43 96
danse-amateur-repertoire@cnd.fr

Source: CN D

More information: https://www.cnd.fr/en/page/323-danse-en-amateur-et-repertoire-grant-programme