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Dancing Grandmothers
En octobre 2010, Eun-Me Ahn a demandé à des femmes âgées, paysannes pour la plupart, de danser pour elle, de façon spontanée. Leurs danses étaient si naturelles et si vivantes qu’elles ont entraîné dans leur mouvement les jeunes danseurs professionnels.
In October 2010, with no predefined itinerary, swept along by the encounters and roads of Chungcheong, Jeolla, Gyeongsang, and Gangwon provinces, Eun-Me Ahn asked elderly women, for the most part peasants, to dance for her, spontaneously. Some of these grandmothers were 60, others 90. They all looked happy when they danced. They were happy to still be able to dance, and happy that someone had asked them to do so. Their dances were so natural and lively that they drew into their movement the young professional dancers from my troupe. Each of their gestures reflected the harshness of their living conditions. It was as if we were looking at an extract from a documentary speaking both of the past and the ground. The wrinkled bodies of these grandmothers were like a book in which had been recorded lives lived over the past century. Each of their dances represented an era, deployed on a harmonious rhythm in a brief fraction of time. Each time we met one of these women, we found ourselves looking at the History of present-day Korea that was personified in their bodies, as though the latter were a History book of our country, far more concrete than any other account from written or oral tradition.
From these meetings, the images filmed in the provinces, and the reactions of the dancers in the troupe, a spectacle both tender and mind-blowing was born, combining the energies of all to, finally, draw the public into the whirlwind of its energy. A tribute to olden times as much as to the immutable vitality of movement. As Eun-Me Ahn still writes: “For me, movement does not only take place at a given time, but rather represents a kind of fossil called on to be activated at a given time to create, through its different gestures, a whole world of suppleness where the present time is infinitely expanded.”
Source: Lola Gruber, Paris Quartier d’été
