Haru no Saïten, un sacre du printemps [transmission 2015]

Extrait de la pièce de Carlotta Ikeda et Ko Murobushi remontée par l’Atelier danse en amateur du conservatoire de La Roche-sur-Yon, coordinateurs Dominique Petit et Ludovic Potié, dans le cadre de “Danse en amateur et répertoire” (2014)

Choreography by Carlotta Ikeda and Ko Murobushi
A choreographic extract remodelled by the amateur dance workshop of the Conservatoire de La Roche-sur-Yon, artistic and technical coordinator Dominique Petit, administrative coordinator Ludovic Potié, as part of the “Danse en amateur et repertoire” programme (2014) (a programme created to assist and promote amateur dancing).

The group
Dominique Petit leads an amateur dance workshop at the Conservatoire de La Roche-sur-Yon. The weekly sessions are attended by adults of very varying technical levels and ages (twenty-three to sixty years for the current project), some of which have been present ever since its creation fifteen years ago. The group presents in public its choreographic works derived from workshop practices. However, the transmission of Carlotta Ikeda and Ko Murobushi’s Haru no Saïten is the first time it has been confronted with an already existing 100% professional script. This is proof of the positive trace of the impact left in 2012 by the hosting of the “Danse en amateur et repertoire” national meeting at the Grand R, the town’s national theatre.

The choreographers
The entire artistic life of Carlotta Ikeda, born in 1941 and who died in 2014, is inseparable from butoh, of which she was one of the major initiators in France, at the turn of the 1980s. First collaborating with Ko Murobushi, she then created in 1974 her own company Ariadone, an all-female troupe. In the following decade, she developed most of her career in France, practicing what would be characterised as “free butoh”. In 1999, six female dancers interpreted Haru no Saïten, un sacre du printemps (a rite of spring). Freed from the bonds of Stravinsky’s music, this piece engages the powers of chaos, eros and the cosmos, not without impregnation by death, transcending the figure of the young girls dancing on the stage. 

The artist
Valérie Pujol spent almost all her professional career as an interpreter with the company Ariadone. Haru no Saïten (1999) was the first creation in which she participated. She appreciates the mature age of the female amateur dancers to whom she transmits an extract today. Indeed, the practice of butoh dance leaves no-one unscathed, with the states of letting go, laying bare, and even close to trance, that it induces, not to mention an expressivity that must be mastered. All the weekly workshops also touch on this quest for a tension never to be let go, that must be kept just right at all times, although in a state of continuous transformation. In this instance, transmission is understood as a putting back into play, far more than a re-creation.