An extract remodelled by the Atelier de danse en amateur of the Maison de la musique et de la danse, coordinator Danielle Krafft, as part of Danse en amateur et répertoire programme 2018/2019 (a programme created to assist and promote amateur dancing). Transmission by Pierre-François Dollé and Irène Feste. Presented 25 May 2019, Centre national de la danse, Pantin.

The dance work when it was created

Balet de neufs danseurs 

Created 31 January 1679 at the Académie royale de musique in Paris

Choreography: Raoul Auger Feuillet

Music: Bellérophon (1679), lyrical tragedy of Jean-Baptiste Lully (entrée grave et canaries)

Original duration: 5 minutes

The group

Amateur dance workshop at the Maison de la musique et de la danse (Bagneux, Île-de-France)

The group comprises amateur adult and teenager dancers who have been attending dance workshops for several years at the Maison de la musique et de la danse. Every year, they take part in a different project which leads to a production. For them, tackling a historic dance is an opportunity to invite a new style and new ways of approaching choreographic practice into their repertoire. Attracted by Raoul Auger Feuillet’s spatial structures and steps, they chose to take on the Balet de neuf danseurs – a rare choreographic work, as most of Feuillet’s notations is made up of solos and two-person dances.

The project

The Balet de neuf danseurs is the final choreographic work from the Recueil de danses composées par M. Feuillet, whose melody is taken from Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Bellérophon tragedy. This work, created in 1679 at the Royal Academy of Music, builds on technical work focusing on a variety of ornamental steps. The members of the Workshop present their own version of this composition, in the purest “Belle danse” style – today known as Baroque dance.

Raoul Auger Feuillet continues to be remembered as the author of La Chorégraphie ou l’art de décrire la danse par caractères, figures et signes démonstratifs, published in 1700, translated into English by John Weaver in 1706 as Orchesography. Or the Art of Dancing. In this reference work, where the term choreography refers to movement writing/notation, Feuillet, reflecting 17th-century analytical mindset, exposes his conception of dance as a system of signs – minimal movement units – whose combinatorics leads to the creation of steps offering numerous codified variations. Le Recueil de danses de bal et d'entrées de ballets which accompanies the Chorégraphie implements his theoretical principles which reveals the richness and complexity of Baroque movement vocabulary to us.

Source : program of the 13th Rencontre Danse en amateur et répertoire, 25-26 May 2019 

Film director, Ivan Chaumeille, has worked with choreographer Dominique Brun a long time, most notably in the production of + One (2014), a creative documentary scheduled as part of the festival “Vidéodanse”, in the editing of which Rafaël Gubitsch participated; he filmed and edited two versions of Afternoon of a faun, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinski for the film Le Faune -un film ou la fabrique de l’archive. He also carried out interviews, and devised and formulated the ROM and video dimensions of the DVD (2007). He shot video sequences for the show Medea-Stimmen by Virginie Mirbeau, created at Festival Les Météores CNN du Havre (2008). With a background in philosophy, he produced a creative documentary entitled Avec François Châtelet, un voyage différentiel (2010) for the collection “À Contre-temps” in co-production with Groupe Galactica, Mosaïque films and Canal 15.

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