Là où l’herbe est plus verte / L’Oiseau-qui-n’existe pas [transmission 2024]

A choreographic extract remodelled by the Groupe chorégraphique amateur, coordinator Fanny Milant, as part of the “Danse en amateur et repertoire” programme 2023/2024 (a programme created to assist and promote amateur dancing).

Transmission by Jean Masse 

Presented on 15 June 2024, Le Manège de Reims. 

The piece when it was created 

Là où l’herbe est plus verte

Firstly produced 14 March 2018 at Dock 11, Berlin

Choreography: Jean Masse

Work for one performer: Jean Masse

Music: Gute Nacht de Franz Schubert – extract from Winterreise, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Jörg Demus 

Original duration: 5 minutes 38

L’Oiseau-qui-n’existe pas

Firstly produced in 1963 in Paris 

Choreography: Karin Waehner

Work for one performer: Karin Waehner

Music: Paul Arma

Duration: 6 minutes

The group

Groupe chorégraphique amateur (Artigues-près-Bordeaux, Nouvelle-Aquitaine)

Created five years ago (in 2019), this amateur dance group is made up of between 6 to 9 dancers. It was founded on a shared passion for choreography, which has attracted dancers across several generations, with ages ranging from 13 to 66. United by a common desire to work together, share experiences, experiment with choreography and develop a taste for performance, each member has found their own place within the group. Accustomed to trying out different forms of physical expression, the dancers are just as comfortable exploring the erratic movements of air through dance, as they are following to the precise choreography of Maud Le Pladec. The group brought this same open-minded attitude to their meeting with Jean Masse, who is also based in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region.  

The project

The idea was to explore the beginnings of modernity in dance by combining a piece by Karin Waenher with a solo created fifty years later by one of her students and dancers, Jean Masse. Là où l’herbe est plus verte, Masse’s latest work, created in 2018, is a solo about memory, choreographed in tribute to Karin Waehner. Waehner’s iconic 1963 work, L’Oiseau-qui-n’existe-pas, holds symbolic value for Jean Masse, both for its structure and for its modern approach. He will endeavour to put these two separate works in dialogue with each other, like two portraits of the same face.