09.12.24 — 10:00
CN D Lyon
Jérôme Bel and Estelle Zhong Mingual's Danses non humaines explores the relationship with nature in early modern dance at the dawn of the 20th century. Many of the questions raised by this aesthetic rupture are still relevant today: the organic body and the constrained body, expression and abstraction, nature and artifice.... At the heart of this movement known as danse libre, two great female dance figures seem to illustrate its two extremes: Loïe Fuller and Isadora Duncan. Yet despite their radically different choreographic achievements, these two dancers shared many points of view on art and dance.
The workshop is built around a back-and-forth between practice and theory. After placing their aesthetic proposals in the cultural context of the time, it offers an experience of their dance, from Duncan's stylistic elements to the evocation of nature. The convergences and divergences between these two dancers will be explored.
A dancer, teacher and dance researcher, Elisabeth Schwartz has devoted many years to interpreting the dances of Isadora Duncan, transmitted in New York by Julia Levien (Isadora Duncan Commemorative Dance Company). She continues to dance this repertoire, as in the film Jaillissements (Réal. R. Sangla) and currently for Jérôme Bel's Isadora Duncan (2019), Danses non humaines (2023) and Cécile Proust's Ce que l'âge apporte à la danse (2023). She passes on this repertoire to amateurs and professionals alike, including Boris Charmatz, François Chaignaud, Xi'An Conservatory, China, Opéra de Paris, Ballet de Lorraine, etc. Elisabeth Schwartz is keen to weave links between movement analysis, dance history and creation: diplomas in AFCMD, Laban-Bartenieff Qualitative Analysis, choreographic culture with Laurence Louppe, and a thesis entitled “Ne rien inventer en art, Paradoxes sur la danse d'Isadora Duncan” (Univ. Lille, direct. Claude Jamain). Thanks to a CND research grant (2020), she has just completed a research project on Isadora Duncan, an interactive archive (Université Grenoble Alpes, INRIA, Université Paris Saclay, INRIA, IRCAM, MOCAPLAB).