Jolie Môme

Léo Ferré’s song stages a girl who catches the eyes and makes everybody dream in a fairground.

Put back in its context, the 1960s and the boom of the leisure industry, Léo Ferré’s song features a girl who catches the eye and fantasy of the greasers and crooners on an outing to a funfair. Interpreted by Laurence Rondoni, she has the eyes of a sorceress. A small moment of joy! Everywhere we look, the setting changes and comes to life. Plays of reflections, picture-in-picture effects and visual gags sweep the song along at a rapid pace that always falls on its feet. Facetious, the lights give the melody its rhythm and flash prettily in the girl’s eyes. It’s as shiny and colourful as a worthless trinket.

Source : Fabienne Arvers

The idea has all it takes to please: with the complicity of a director, a choreographer plays along by masterfully setting to dance a melody taken from the repertoire of French song, where, most often, poetry rhymes with humour and tenderness. While none of these dances resembles a video-clip supposed to illustrate the song, they are always an original choreographic proposal. A contemporary version of the old “chansons de geste” (French epic poems), they allow access, in just a few minutes, to the highly diversified universes of the choreographers. Take a song, its verses and its chorus, the interpreter’s tone of voice, the subject or the atmosphere evoked, and see what images, colours, figures and rhythms dance could give them.

Source : Fabienne Arvers