Filmed in wide shots in a minimalist setting – flames, which also give the stage its only lighting –, Madira Sardancourt throws herself into the lyrical flow of Jacques Brel’s words, while all her dance irradiates this offering of love that nothing, apparently, can burn out. 

This is a song that certainly wasn’t easy to treat. Brel’s universe has penetrated our imagination to such an extent and has so coloured and sublimed our experiences that it could be no simple task to offer an image of it. This perhaps accounts for the simple and unpretentious decision of the choreographer/interpreter and the director. As her alias first name indicates, this French dancer practices Indian dance. She uses the highly codified gestural language of a traditional art to express, here, the words of eternal love.

Source : Fabienne Arvers

After Indian studies and initial training in yoga (and Indian dance) in Paris, Madira Sardancourt was awarded an Indian government scholarship in 1975 to study all aspects of yoga at Kaivalyadhama in Lonavala, an institute renowned for its scientific and medical research into yoga.

She extended her stay in India until the end of 1977 to perfect her Indian dance training.

Since then, she has taught Bharata Natyam and Hatha Yoga, respecting both tradition and the individual.

Source : Les Hivernales

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