The long story of « Vieilles Gens, Vieux Fers »

In 1928 in Hamburg, the young 24 year-old dancer Jean Weidt presented the first piece from his suite “Vieilles Gens, Vieux Fers”. Traumatised by the aftermath of the Great War, he introduced a fascinating and provocative vision of Expressionist dance. Revived throughout his career, the piece is emblematic of his engagement as a “red dancer”, placing dance at the heart of politics and social issues.

In 1948 Françoise and Dominique Dupuy performed this piece with the Ballets des Arts. In 2006, the revival of the work went beyond questioning memory and reconstruction to investigate the very substance of this dance, its body states, its energy, etc.

During the performance, Françoise and Dominique Dupuy accompany the dance with images, words and demonstrations of movement in order to put it back into its historical, political and aesthetic context.

Updating: November 2010

(1904-1988)

German dancer, choreographer and teacher from a working-class background, Jean Weidt dedicated his art to the political dimension of the body and to the proletarian cause in particular.

In 1929, under the Weimar Republic, he created the ensemble “Die Roten Tänzer” (The Red Dancers), a group of politically-engaged dancers who took the initiative to tackle political and social questions on stage through the artistic means of expressionist dance. As a member of the communist party, he fled Germany in 1933 and lived between Paris, Moscow and Prague. At the start of the Second World War, he was deported to a stateless persons' refugee camp in Algeria before joining the British Army.

In 1946 he founded the Ballet des Arts and won the gold medal at the International Dance Archives Competition in Copenhagen with "La Cellule” in 1947. He returned to Berlin in 1949, where we worked for the Comic Opera in particular.

Last update : November 2010

Since 2001, the National Center for Dance (CND) has been making recordings of its shows and educational programming and has created resources from these filmed performances (interviews, danced conferences, meetings with artists, demonstrations, major lessons, symposia specialized, thematic arrangements, etc.).