From the post-war period to the 1960s, leading teachers and choreographers trained many of today’s dancers. Christine Brunel, Marilen Breuker and Luc Petton asked Karin Waehner, Jacqueline Robinson and Dominique Dupuy, respectively, to transmit to them one of their solos. This act of transmission, the passage from one body to another, is filmed in an interweaving of dialogues, rehearsals and archive documents. 

This film highlights the meaning and the stakes of dance transmission, while painting the portrait of artists. Digging into their memories and seeking the physical sensations of that time, each choreographer revives their dance in another body, in different ways. Christine Brunel in L'oiseau qui n'existe pas by Karin Waehner (1963), Marilen Breuker in Stèle, a tribute to Mary Wigman, by Jacqueline Robinson (1969), and Luc Petton in En vol (1983) by Dominique Dupuy show both the particularity of the work of each choreographer and their filiations, especially with the German expressionist dance of Mary Wigman.

Source : Irène Filiberti

Dominique Dupuy entered Jean Weidt's Ballets des arts at the age of 16, where he first performed solo roles such as that of the son in “La Cellule” by Jean Weidt, who was awarded first prize in the competition of the Archives internationales de la danse in Copenhagen in 1947. After several years dancing with Françoise Dupuy as “Françoise et Dominique”, the pair founded the Ballets modernes de Paris together, as part of which Dominique Dupuy would interpret several legendary roles: le Faune, le Mandarin merveilleux, le Piéton de l'air, l'Homme et son désir. Dominique Dupuy created six solos, the first of which came into being at the request of Amélie Grand and was conceived for the first week of the Avignon Dance Week, a precursor of the Hivernales Dance Festival: “Le Cercle dans tous ses états” (1979), “Trajectoires” (1980), “En vol” (1983), “Ballum circus” (1987), “L'homme debout, il…” (1995), “Opus 67-97” (1997). On more than one occasion, Dupuy expressed his opinion on the experience of making a solo, both at conferences and in publications. The project which would revive his solos came into being at the request of Luc Petton, for whom Dominique Dupuy recreated the cube sequence from “En vol” for the project “Passeur de danse”. He then recreated five other sequences for “Passeur de solitudes I”, presented in May 2000 at the Regard du cygnet centre in Paris and at the Avignon Hivernales Dance Festival.

From 1995 to 2007, he and Françoise Dupuy directed the Mas de la danse – the principal centre for the study and research of contemporary dance in France. Since then he has devoted his time to putting his archives in order.

Dominique Dupuy, died on May 1, 2024.