A woman shines another glass, while, in the distance, an embracing couple dances languidly. Hugging, rolling on the ground and then, suddenly, welcomed by a suspended bed. We are far from the interior tempo proposed by Edith Piaf, whom we easily imagine, in her black dress and hands outstretched, recounting the love story with its tragic end of this couple who kill themselves in a hotel room.

Source : Ministère de la Culture

Anne-Marie Reynaud (1945-2009) began dancing at Irène Popard’s school, then with Martha Graham in London, then joined Catherine May Atlani’s Ballets de la Cité in 1973 and the GRTOP (Paris Opera theatrical research group) in 1974, where she performed Carolyn Carlson’s ballets. In 1976, she founded the Four Solaire with Odile Azagury. The Nevers-based company became a National Choreographic Centre in 1989. In 1995, she was in charge of programming for the Paris region’s Île de Danse Festival and, in 1998, she became responsible for pedagogy at the CND (National Centre for Dance) until 2009.

Source : Lise Brunel, Dictionnaire de la danse (dir. de Philippe Le Moal), Larousse, 2008

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