Quai de l'arrivée [transmission 2017]

Extrait remonté par Évidanse (Limoges), responsable artistique Catherine Mounet, dans le cadre de Danse en amateur et répertoire (2016)

An extract remodelled by Évidanse (Limoges), artistic manager Catherine Mounet, as part of the “Danse en amateur et repertoire” programme (2016) (a programme created to assist and promote amateur dancing).

The group
Created in 2013 in Limoges by Catherine Mounet, on completion of an amateur project led with the choreographer Hervé Koubi, this group consists of eight female dancers who attend the same contemporary dance class. Out of a variety of artistic projects, a collaboration with Sharon Fridman was particularly responsible for stimulating the young interpreters in their desire to take on creation and repertoire work. It was after the meeting with the choreographer Gisèle Gréau that the idea to discover the company Le Four Solaire, an historical facet of French contemporary dance, took root. 

The project
In 1980, when Anne-Marie Reynaud and Le Four Solaire collective staged Quai de l’arrivée, for five interpreters and a saxophonist, the aim was to narrate the story of “characters in distress on a railway station platform at dawn”. This mixing of dance and theatre at the heart of a visual universe that is “dark, strange and wacky in which the absurd assumes a dominant role” stimulated the group, happy to immerse itself in a creation marked by surrealism and under the influence of German Expressionism. The powerful idea to pay tribute to Anne-Marie Reynaud also spurred on the work. 

The choreographer
In 1976, the choreographer and pedagogue Anne-Marie Reynaud (1945-2009) founded, together with Odile Azagury, Le Four Solaire, a landmark company in the history of French dance, while also participating in 1974 in Carolyn Carlson’s GRTOP (Opéra de Paris Theatrical Research Group). Her shows, bubbling over with surrealist fantasy and finely balanced antics, were presented both in theatres and in the streets alfresco. Of a sharing and caring nature, she diversified her activities, nominated as director first of Îles de Danses in 1995 and then of the Training and Pedagogical department of the Centre national de la danse in Pantin in 1998. In 2005, she custom-designed for Pedro Pauwels the solo Pliages, which would be her last choreography.