Ashbury St. is first a street in San Francisco that witnessed the birth of the hippie movement in the 1960s: it is thus a symbol. The symbol of an entire era. By taking this street as my title I plunge inside it. The street where Janis Joplin dragged her boots with the Capricorn Girls and where the Grateful Dead gave their first concerts. A whole crowd of rock icons have passed through here.

More committed and more polished, Ashbury St. requires from its interpreters another maturity, more militant, more elegant, more profound. I shall seek to flush out the paradox: Flower Power faced with the Vietnam War, the cool attitude, the violent deaths, the young men sacrificed for a nation.

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/

François Gauducheau was born in Nantes. After studying Letters and spending a year as an aid worker in Africa, he moved to Paris and began documentary production at ORTF. From 1970 to 1980, he produced a number of films, including for the show “Le Jour du Seigneur": France, Africa, India, Asia: the subjects are varied with strong social and human accents. At the start of the 80s, he joined the company Vidéo 44, which produces numerous institutional films, mainly for local communities. A few years later, he created GF. Production, his own company that enables him to both direct and to explore the world of documentaries once again. In 1997, he created the Association des Producteurs Audiovisuels de Pays de la Loire and sold his company to the group Her-bak. Since then, François Gauducheau has produced numerous documentaries for television. He works with regional production companies: Pois-chiche films, 24 Images, Odysséus Productions, Plan Large, Aligal, Aber images, etc. In 2008, with a few close friends he created a non-profit company, Primavista, which does testing, recording of artistic performances and short films with its own recording and editing equipment. Since July 2010, he has been a member of the board of directors of Association Télénantes, which develops future local Nantes television programming for presentation to the CSA (Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel).

Source : François Gauducheau 's website

More information :

francoisgauducheau.fr