One would swear, this person is clearly chasing a mouse with the internal malleolus of his foot and is now crushing the little beast with the sheer force of his sacroiliac joint. The one next door entered Bruce Lee’s body at lightning speed along with that of an ostrich feather fern. And we, stunted in our chair in a digestive position, here we are almost out of breath for them just looking at them. These grade 3 students are already body magicians, but even their own lungs are in dire straits. “It’s impossible to repeat that with the masks, the play is way too cardio”, breathes us Louna Delbouys-Roy, the young dancer responsible for transmitting to this outgoing promotion the piece Removing (2015) composed by the new director of the premises, Noé Soulier. But here, at the National Center for Contemporary Dance of Angers (CNDC), prestigious and unique diploma school exclusively dedicated to this discipline, the rehearsal studio is too small to respect the four small square meters of gap between dancers which allow to unmask. “So, we are going back”, resumes Louna Delbouys-Roy. We would spend hours watching the young woman build, as she does, a fantastic patchwork of mental images to translate each physical quality: “There, you pierce a balloon with a needle, you take the fly swatter, you fall into your right support, and you swallow the leg with your belly.” We did not attempt to do so.
These twenty students from Angers will soon have to stick to it in front of the spectators of the Biennale de la danse, where they will meet the students of the Lyon conservatory to dance together. Removing Reset at Usines Fagor, in Lyon, on June 11 and 12. A piece on which they will be evaluated to obtain or not their diploma, sesame towards an extremely tense labor market where access to creation platforms and work residences will take on all the appearances of the Parisian outer ring road next year on a Sunday evening of rain. “For us, it will be very hard to enter the profession, Aïda explains, catching her breath during the break. Those who want to start their own company will come after existing companies, whose repeat slots have often been postponed. The workspaces are all congested. ” As for those who prefer to climb the Everest represented by each hearing, they are now showing great apprehension.
“We just want to dance!”
Indeed, some students leaving this year of the CNDC – a three-year course – are afraid to start the race with a ball on their feet. In 2019, many dance professionals (including choreographers as renowned as Gisèle Vienne or Maguy Marin) published in Release a forum attacking the management of the human resources of the directorate then in place, as well as its “Educational and aesthetic line against the evolution of contemporary forms”. The then director, Robert Swinston, choreographer and former dancer in the company of the American Merce Cunningham, was accused of obscuring in his teaching the dynamism and renewal of the scene of the last thirty years. And so it is the fear, for this latest promotion raised in its fold, to see itself placarded before even auditioning. “When, on your CV, it says ‘CNDC student in 2018’, you are cataloged, we are blown away. The choreographers, like the students of other schools, think that here we can only dance Cunningham! Which is hyper-unfair because we have touched on a great diversity of aesthetics. There was a generational conflict between an old way of conceiving dance as the institutions that support it, and the one that is now emerging. But we just want to dance! ”
Since the controversy, which exploded like a small bomb in the performing arts sector, this “New way of conceiving dance” is embodied today in the young tandem formed by the choreographer Noé Soulier, at the head of the institution, and Marion Colleter, his assistant. Appointed in July 2019 by the public authorities, they arrived in July 2020 at the head of a prestigious institution that makes international professionals drool. And for good reason: the CNDC is both a school, a place of creation for artists (what is called a national choreographic center) and a place of dissemination. “So that an artist welcomed here can simultaneously create, perform and give workshops”, explains the duo, who insists on the difference between a traditional conservatory, where one seeks above all to train good dancers, and their vision of what could be the CNDC of the future: a great art school heir to the rigor and the labor-force spirit of a PARTS (the Belgian school of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, very desirable for young artists from all over the world) as well as a new generation institution determined to reform the traditional articulation between theory and convenient : “We often consider that theory must come to explain dance, which in my opinion places art in a position of inferiority, tirelessly on the side of the blur, the unarticulated, summarizes Noé Soulier. We are therefore trying to build an education that avoids the divide between intellectual dancers and physical dancers. “
“To transmit at the same time as to create”
He himself is the embodiment of it, an essayist choreographer passionate about composition, whose approaches he likes to dissect both in the field of dance, music, contemporary art and literature. And here he comes alive when he imagines what courses on the financing, communication and dissemination of art might look like. “There are a lot of artists who formalized and played with these questions. If we take the relationship between art and its own funding, it may be interesting, for example, to start from a work by Michael Asher [artiste conceptuel américain, ndlr], in the 1970s, which consisted of bringing together the sales space and the exhibition space in a gallery. And only afterwards, we could summon the theorists. And then observe the differences between the economic model of contemporary art and that of dance. Well, that’s just one example, eh… ” Starting from works, therefore, these strange resources which sometimes explain the world better than an essay, if one learns to dissect them.
These apprenticeships will begin with the future promotion, just composed in the spring after a cycle of three auditions. From next year, around twenty students (out of 360 applications received) from all over the world – Lithuania, Ukraine, Israel, Brazil, Japan… – when the previous promotion had only one student will thus arrive in the walls. foreign. An international shift that is not necessarily inconsistent when we want to open the school more to non-Western practices and know-how. And in this ambition of “decentering”, teachers obviously have their role to play. But are they only “teachers”, for that matter? “No not necessarily ! bounces Noé Soulier. Director Marion Sieffert, for example, is not exactly what you might call a dance teacher. I like the idea that artists can transmit at the same time as they create. ” It is also for this reason that the CNDC often appears as a sort of Rolls-Royce in the eyes of the profession: here, the teachers are not permanent – enough to invent a hyperagile educational model, nourished by a great diversity of speakers. .
“From a distance, it was very hard …”
“Me, the moment that gave me back a crazy joy, this year is the extraordinary week we spent with house choreographer Ousmane Sy, remembers Josephine, in a hallway. His untimely death [l’artiste est mort brutalement en décembre, ndlr] We were very moved, we kept in touch with his dancers. “ Obviously, this year, not all the workshops were able to take place in the studio. Not those planned with foreign artists confined to their homes, like RubberLegz, for example, this star of tutting (practice of station wagon close to the Rubik’s Cube) and close collaborator of the American William Forsythe. “It’s a shame, he’s great, but we could only work with him on Zoom, at the end of our day, explain the students. We spent the morning in theory lessons, we spent the afternoon over three intensive hours in the studio, and we had to connect to the computer between 6 and 8 pm hours, tired … Except that at RubberLegz, it was 9 o’clock in the morning, he was in the cafe, ball behind his screen, with his geometric arm games. No, from a distance, it was very hard… ” But now it’s over. Distance, isolation, like polemics against a background of a change of direction, are ancient history today – a discipline that will have little place in a contemporary school. And as these twenty young people prepare to enter, feverish but enthusiastic, into the profession, the title of the piece they will dance to celebrate their reunion with the public, Removing Reset, sounds like a metaphor. Both from their upcoming trips, but also from their school. «Remove», in English: to move. «Reset»: reset.
Removing Reset, ch. Noé Soulier. Recreation of Removing for 40 dancers, from the young ballet of the National Conservatory of Music and Dance of Lyon and of the school of the National Center for Contemporary Dance in Angers. On June 11 and 12, Biennale de la danse de Lyon.
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