Madeleine Fournier

Based on the two-step bourrée, a traditional dance from France’s Berry region, Branle weaves a canvas of the to-ing and fro-ing of bodies which, despite never entering into contact with each other, is deeply erotic, loving, and alive. Making use of a joyful play on words in terms of its different meanings as word, verb and its afferent adjective – ébranlé, meaning shaken or rattled –, the choreographer borrows from the world of the ball, exploiting to the full its form, and potential for setting in motion energies and affects. From out of this choreographic archetype of collective dance, she summons up an ancestral memory of the body. The choreographic loop of the basic step, which involves coming close and then moving away, becomes the impulse behind infinite variations on the relationships between the performers. This, in turn, progressively enables emotions to come to the surface, as well as reminiscences, deeply-buried movements, in short, a whole invisible life. As a place for the expression of the creative and destructive forces of the body, and in which our collective sub-conscience becomes apparent, the ball here takes us to the threshold of an unsettling feeling of eternity.

Madeleine Fournier

Madeleine Fournier is a dancer and choreographer who trained in the Paris CNR and the Angers CNDC. She has worked with many choreographers and visual artists since 2007, in France, Germany, Belgium and Portugal. She has created a series of pieces with Jonas Chéreau, and they have also produced the film 306 Manon directed by Tamara Seilman. She created her company ODETTA in 2017 and she created the solo Labourer in 2018, as well as a song and dance piece, Catherine und Madeleine: Zwei Palmitos, in collaboration with Catherine Hershey. In 2019 she created Ce Jardin with Ina Mihalache (of the famous YouTube channel Solangeteparle) for the SACD program Vive le Sujet! in the Avignon Festival; in 2021 she created an experimental musical called La Chaleur, as well as a film with Andrea Baglione, Ce qui est en haut est comme ce qui est en bas. Her work is closely connected to experimental music, singing, dancing, performance and vegetable lives, which leads her to work with artists from various fields (music, dance, landscaping, visual arts, …). She likes to observe how the context (gardens, the theatre, concert halls, galleries, cinemas) and the codes that are associated to it interact and reshape the performance.