Extract reproduced by 66 dancers from groups participating in the French National Encounters of Danse en amateur et répertoire (2018/2019). Transmission by Marie-Charlotte Chevalier, Axelle Locatelli. Coordination Marion Bastien. Presented on 26 May 2019, Prairie du Triangle, Parc de La Villette, Paris

The dance work when it was created

Die Welle [La Vague] 

Firstly produced: 1930

Choreography: Albrecht Knust

Dance work for 64 performers

The project

The Wave, created in Germany in 1930 by Albrecht Knust, one of Rudolf Laban’s earliest collaborators, is a choral dance for sixty-four people. Through waves, ebbs and flows, and ripples, this dance invites to take part in a collective experience of interrelated listening and tuning by using simple movements such as walking, skipping and pliés.

The 2019-edition dancers worked on The Wave to bring the French National Encounters of Danse en amateur et répertoire to a close with a collective practice. 

Albrecht Knust, a dancer in folk dance groups during his youth, joined the company of German choreographer and theoretician Rudolf Laban in 1922. Knust, marked by Laban’s system of thought – which sought to rethink the role of the body in modern-day society -, devoted his life to perfecting and to transmitting Laban’s choreology, which was used to accurately transcribe movement as graphical signs (highly-sophisticated system for writing movement, choreology), firstly at the Laban School in Hamburg, where he was Head from 1924 to 1934, then, from 1951, at the Essen Folkwangschule. His numerous writings such as his Abstract of Laban choreology led to the development of this writing system around the world. As a choreographer in his own right, his works such as The Wave and The Scales focus on the principles of choreutic composition, intended for experimenting and observing the dynamics and transformations of the body in three-dimensional space.

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.