Grand écart

The first piece with the Chopinot dance company, “Grand écart” was created in 1982, one year after the prize won at the Rencontres chorégraphiques de Bagnolet (Bagnolet choreography encounters) competition for “Appel d’air” (In-draught). In this new piece, Régine Chopinot endeavours to work particularly on the relationship which links the theatrical action and the danced action.

Eight dancers in smart casual clothes inhabit the stage, which is laid out in corridors: “The dancers seem, from the back of the stage, to go up the front of the stage as if to leave the performance space: they mount an attack on the audience in a brutal confrontation” [1]. Drawing their gestures from everyday life, the dancers combine them with more technical movements, resolutely inscribing the choreography with irony “and the re-classified assembling of references, dear to the postmodern era” [2]: “The choreographic images emerge in the course of their connections and their fleeting qualitative organisation” [1].

The sound and the light play a particular role here: the bodies speak by means of onomatopoeias, while on several occasions, “the light sweeps from the stage to the audience, crudely illuminating the audience who sometimes make the thundering noise of a plane taking off” [1].

[1] Annie Suquet, « Chopinot », Le Mans : éd. Cénomane, 2010, p. 25.
[2] Annie Suquet, op. cit., p. 14.

Press quotes

“With Régine Chopinot, it is no longer about seduction, it’s about fascination. Indeed, “Grand Ecart” uses confrontation, not diversion. Two lines full of hanging clothes line the corridors which direct the comings and goings of the dancers. There is no way out of these comings and goings, of this ceaseless intermittence between the proximity and the distancing of the bodies. To stop, it is necessary to fall, as the dancers do in a very neutral manner, from very high to very low. The group of solitudes which stand alongside each other charge and withdraw with unstoppable gestures. A scratch, a touch, a rustle, a slap emerging from a pounding rhythm are all immediately inscribed in a kind of immediate memory. The dance fascinates, paralyses, but does not charm. One receives it like the sound “stimuli” marvellously staged in an anonymous and neutral space by Philippe Cachia’s soundtrack.

However, “Grand Ecart”, which has the violence, not of the cry, but of the murmur in the night, does not abuse its audience. Régine Chopinot does not impose a new concept of dance which would be supposed to educate.”

M.-C. Vernay, Les Saisons de la danse, No. 142, March 1982, p. 18

Programme extract

“Eight dancers, smart shoes under their arm, bodies supple or moving into an everyday gesture, space voluntarily reduced to a corridor, jingles from the background music.”

Programme from the Théâtre Les Ateliers (Lyon, February 1982)

Updating: February 2013