Sehnsucht [transmission 2015]

Extrait de la pièce de Karin Waehner remontée par le groupe de recherche du centre chorégraphique Mouvement et Danse (Abbeville-st-Lucien), dans le cadre de “Danse en amateur et répertoire” (2014)

Choreography by Karin Waehner
A choreographic extract remodelled by the research group of the Centre Chorégraphique Mouvement et Danse (Abbeville-st-Lucien), as part of the “Danse en amateur et repertoire” programme (2014) (a programme created to assist and promote amateur dancing).

The group
In an exceptional setting, in Picardie, Marie Devillers, a dance teacher, leads a choreographic research group consisting of a dozen women aged eighteen to thirty-two who have long been her students. Marie Devillers’ teaching and choreographies are inspired by her considerable experience as a student and interpreter with the proponents of the French school of German filiation (Dupuy, Waehner, etc.). Close-knit and seasoned in this approach, this group has already defended her revival of Doris Humphrey’s Soaring (1920) for the “Danse en amateur et repertoire” meeting in 2013. 

The choreographer
Karin Waehner (1926-1999) studied under Mary Wigman, the founder of expressionist dance in prewar Germany (having spent some time in the USA, she was also close to Graham, Limón and Horst). But it was in France that she developed her career, with the heirs of this branch of choreographic modernity (Dupuy, Andrews, Robinson). Her teaching had a marked influence on French contemporary dance that was all set to flourish at that time. She defends “the permanent life that we feel is always ready to gush forth, even when a rigorous form appears to maintain and contain the effervescence.” Her work Sehnsucht (1981) testifies to a prosperous moment of creativity, in the wake of the Paris-Berlin great exhibition at the Centre Pompidou.

The artist
Trio de femmes is a piece in Karin Waehner’s work Sehnsucht (1981). Three mothers, with very different characters, confront a context of war and misery, against a background of poems in song by Brecht and Eisler. Marie Devillers, the group’s director, has herself interpreted this piece. Christine Caradec, who remodelled the extract, has produced a Labanotation of it. These two memory logics, one an embodiment, the other a document, bolster one another for this revival. No doubt that the de-multiplication into several trios presents an additional compositional problem in the organisation of the circulations. However, the focus is above all on the search for the quality of an intimate movement and a state of body, specific to expressive dance.