An extract remodelled by the group Atelier 21, coordination by Pascale Brient, as part of the “Danse en amateur et repertoire” programme (2019/2020) (a programme created to assist and promote amateur dancing).  

Transmission by Elisabetta Areri, Benjamin Lamarche, performers in the piece when it was created

Presented on 24 October 2020, Chaillot - Théâtre national de la Danse (Paris).  

The piece when it was created 

Ellipse 

Firstly produced 18 January 2006 at the Centre chorégraphique national in Nantes 

Choreography: Claude Brumachon 

Piece for six performers: Vincent Blanc, Claude Brumachon, Roxana Del Castillo, Lise Fassier, Elisabetta Gareri, Benjamin Lamarche 

Music Bill Callahan, « Rouleaux sur l’atlantique », « A River Ain’t Too Much To Love » ; Paul Flynn, « Face the Music » ; Magda, « The Black Room » ; DJ Krush, « Kakusei » ; Richard D.James, « Drukqs » ; Sigur Ros, « Von » ; Bumcello, « Nude for Love » ; Darius Keeler, « Londinium » ; Sigur Ros, « Agaetis Byrjum » ; Robert Wyatt, « Rock Bottom » 

Original duration: 1 hour 

The group 

Atelier 21 (Lussac-lès-Châteaux, Nouvelle-Aquitaine) 

Atelier 21 of the Lussac-lès-Châteaux MJC is made up of eight amateur dancers regularly practicing contemporary dance. Working  regularly on creative projects with various choreographers (Odile  Azagury, Barbara Blanchet, Laurent Falguiéras), such as ”Le Festin de soi” in 2014-2015, they also seek to revive repertoire pieces, such as Régine Chopinot’s ”Végétal” for the Danse en amateur et repertoire programme. 

The project 

Written in a very short time, with a feeling of urgency, Claude Brumachon’s ”Ellipse” breaks with most of his choreographic works: with no decors and with no narrative argument other than the presence of the bodies moving around the stage, ”Ellipse” tends towards an abstraction made of outbursts of sensuality or violence that circulate within the group of dancers. Alternating between collective frenzy, and solo or duo moments, the group moves apart, reforms, observes, waits, in a game of to-and-fro between meticulous writing and freedom of invention. 

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/

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