Choreography by Karin Waehner
A choreographic extract remodelled by the research group of the Centre Chorégraphique Mouvement et Danse (Abbeville-st-Lucien), as part of the “Danse en amateur et repertoire” programme (2014) (a programme created to assist and promote amateur dancing).

The group
 In an exceptional setting, in Picardie, Marie Devillers, a dance teacher, leads a choreographic research group consisting of a dozen women aged eighteen to thirty-two who have long been her students. Marie Devillers’ teaching and choreographies are inspired by her considerable experience as a student and interpreter with the proponents of the French school of German filiation (Dupuy, Waehner, etc.). Close-knit and seasoned in this approach, this group has already defended her revival of Doris Humphrey’s Soaring (1920) for the “Danse en amateur et repertoire” meeting in 2013. 

The choreographer
 Karin Waehner (1926-1999) studied under Mary Wigman, the founder of expressionist dance in prewar Germany (having spent some time in the USA, she was also close to Graham, Limón and Horst). But it was in France that she developed her career, with the heirs of this branch of choreographic modernity (Dupuy, Andrews, Robinson). Her teaching had a marked influence on French contemporary dance that was all set to flourish at that time. She defends “the permanent life that we feel is always ready to gush forth, even when a rigorous form appears to maintain and contain the effervescence.” Her work Sehnsucht (1981) testifies to a prosperous moment of creativity, in the wake of the Paris-Berlin great exhibition at the Centre Pompidou.

The artist
Trio de femmes is a piece in Karin Waehner’s work Sehnsucht (1981). Three mothers, with very different characters, confront a context of war and misery, against a background of poems in song by Brecht and Eisler. Marie Devillers, the group’s director, has herself interpreted this piece. Christine Caradec, who remodelled the extract, has produced a Labanotation of it. These two memory logics, one an embodiment, the other a document, bolster one another for this revival. No doubt that the de-multiplication into several trios presents an additional compositional problem in the organisation of the circulations. However, the focus is above all on the search for the quality of an intimate movement and a state of body, specific to expressive dance. 

Waehner was born in 1926 in Gleiwitz in Germany (now Gliwice, Poland). In 1950 she moved to Buenos Aires, where she taught modern dance until 1953, when she met the mime Marcel Marceau. He inspired her to leave for Paris and to study mime with Etienne Decroux. In Paris she also opened a dance school and choreographed. She appeared with Jerome Andrews as Les Compagnons de la Danse, co-founded the experimental Theatre d'Essai de la Danse in 1955 and started her own touring Ballets Contemporains Karin Waehner in 1959.

She choreographed some 40 pieces and wrote a treatise, Outillage choregraphique, analysing the components of creating movement. But it was as a teacher that she had her most lasting impact. Angelin Preljocaj, France's most prominent contemporary-dance choreographer, whose own company has played several successful seasons in London, trained with her at the Schola Cantorum in Paris where she initiated contemporary-dance teaching. "I had already studied ballet and she opened my eyes to contemporary dance - to its passion for creation, improvisation and new forms," he says. "Coming from the Wigman expressionist tradition, her movement had a generosity, a way of going to extremes. Expressionism signifies something emerging from the inside and there was in her style a maximum of amplitude and sincerity." Karin Waehner also possessed those qualities as a person and selflessly battled for her pupils. 

Karin Waehner, dancer, choreographer and teacher: born Gleiwitz, Germany 12 March 1926; died 17 February 1999.

Source : The Independant 

From live stage images to life in images, the  director and video artist Karim Zeriahen seems to have found the  shortest way. Since the beginning of the 90s, when he worked in close  relationship with choreographer Philippe Decouflé, he learned how to put  the art of stage in motion, contemporary dance most of the time. Karim  Zeriahen then starts a fruitful collaboration with Montpellier based  choreographer Mathilde Monnier. Stop, Videlilah, day of night, short  films adapted from her stage creations. Each time, Karim Zeriahen's   camera takes over the place with movement, the body language is not  frozen but magnified. Choreographer Herman Diephuis also joins this  gallery of dancing portraits. Documentaries on figures such like Albert  Maysles or Hubert de Givenchy and from Joe Dalessandro to Paul  Morrissey, he sets a signature, a camera always in action with  confidence.

Today the director goes further with a new  project and tracks the subtle movements of the body language beyond the  physical appearance. A collection of living portraits as unique pièces  reminding us of the master portraitists of renaissance. These living  natures consists in filming the subject in a certain amount of time,  almost still, with signs of respiration, eye blinks, as if it were  posing for a painting. They are then displayed on a flat screen with a  memory card. With this collection starting, Karim Zeriahen, with his  documentary and artist vision, interrogates himself about the virtual  world filled with images. By taking a pause, and his models with him, he  questions the way we look at things, the way we look at life.

Source: Philippe Noisette 

En savoir plus: www.karimzeriahen.com

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