Cher Ulysse [transmission 2014]

Extrait chorégraphique remonté par le groupe Accordanse (Poissy), directrice de l’école Frédérique Laillet, dans le cadre de Danse en amateur et répertoire (2013)

A choreographic extract remodelled by the group Accordanse (Poissy), school director Frédérique Laillet, as part of the “Danse en amateur et repertoire” programme (2013) (a programme created to assist and promote amateur dancing).

The group

For more than nine years now, Accordanse consists of some twenty students who dance two or three times a week. These students have technical classwork as well as spending time in workshops, and in choreographic research, creation and composition work. They are familiar with the stage and different venues and have often participated in various events: Fédération Française de Danse meetings, shared meetings, city entertainment and events, Saint-Germain-en-Laye “sound and light show”, to name but a few.

The project

The way the choreographer sees things has changed because the way we see the world has changed. A different way of seeing things, it’s true, but despite this, life is still just as vibrant, life is victorious. We swirl and soar, we drink to inebriation so that, whatever happens, we never forget the enchantment of the world. A work that never stops telling us “melancholy won’t win”. It is above all the richness and strength of these feelings that Frédérique Laillet wishes to share with her students, together with this direct and pleasurable relationship with the world. She also wants to teach them to access Gallotta’s very specific language: rhythm of feet, little trots, starts and stops, sudden races, outlined gestures resulting from contained and then released energy. 

The choreographer

Jean-Claude Gallotta is one of the most important figures of the Nouvelle Danse Française (New French Dance) of the 1980s. He was one of the first to make humour and everyday life part of the plot of his works. With a background in visual arts, he discovered dance through John Cage. Following a stay in New York where he discovered the work of Merce Cunningham and the Post-moderns (Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs and Steve Paxton), he founded the group Émile Dubois in 1979 and created Ulysse. Attached since 1981 to the Maison de la culture de Grenoble, the company became a CCN in 1984. Since then, Jean-Claude Gallotta has never stopped creating. His attraction for repertoire work dates from 2007, the year in which he remodelled his flagship piece Ulysse that he turned into Cher Ulysse.