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Jazz dance choreography in France from 2009 to today: fusion, innovation and activism

Name: Jazz dance choreography in France from 2009 to today: fusion, innovation and activism
Uploaded: 2024-11-25T12:31:35+00:00
Duration: 33 min 1 s
Description: While jazz dance is often associated with teaching, there is no shortage of original productions in this genre. With its history and numerous permutations, jazz dance is fertile ground for choreographic creation, and today, France has its own unique style of jazz.

While jazz dance is often associated with teaching, there is no shortage of original productions in this genre. With its history and numerous permutations, jazz dance is fertile ground for choreographic creation, and today, France has its own unique style of jazz.

Author

Frédérique Seyve

Collection

Numeridanse

Introduction

In 1948, Katherine Dunham’s company brought jazz dance (in its codified form) to France. The style further developed with the arrival of dancers and dance teachers such as Walter Nicks and Vanoye Aikens, and, in 1975, choreographer and teacher, Matt Mattox. Each member of this generation contributed to the spread of jazz dance across France, leading to its current popularity. Since many jazz dancers split their time between performance, teaching and creation, original jazz choreography developed within a range of different contexts.

While jazz dance is better known in the entertainment sector, with works made for television and musical comedies, many pieces were developed for the arts scene. French jazz choreography has come a long way since the first French jazz company was founded in 1978 by Serge Alzetta. Its development, like the style itself, is marked by diversity and contrast. Today, it remains faithful to the spirit of jazz: multifaceted, free, modern, impactful, and always changing with the times.

Wayne Barbaste
Dans la foule
(2009, reproduction and recording from April 2024)

In recent years, successive social and political crises have challenged our conception of the individual’s place in society. Wayne Barbaste, a jazz choreographer with a contemporary style, explored this issue back in 2009 with his work, Dans la Foule. The piece also examines the future of jazz dance through a contemporary lens.

With energetic leg work, he centres the notion of rebound, creating echos between the bodies of the dancers, themselves seen as musicians, each giving their own musical interpretation, within jazz’s particular rhythms. Here, Wayne Barbaste uses the vocabulary of jazz to express both his own vision and that of the group.

Anne-Marie Porras
Nadir… Les oubliés
(2010)

From her early choreographic work for the Maurice Béjart centre in Brussels, to the creation of her company in the mid 1980s, Anne-Marie Porras stands out as one of the major figures in jazz choreography. Her vision is underpinned by great creative freedom and a deep sense of humanity.

The piece, Nadir… Les oubliés is one of her most emblematic works. A cultural encounter with Morocco and a meeting of different physicalities, this piece sits between two worlds, between shadow and light. This open air performance displays the most candid and sincere aspects of her unique work: vital energy, strong contrasts, an earthy connection to the world, and an exploration of outlines and imbalance, where individuals come together in a group that strives to tame itself.

Vivien Visentin
Pulse
(2018)

Pulse takes us on an inner journey to discover the source of movement itself. Cédric Préhaut and Vivien Visentin explore how we present ourselves to others and at what moment our inner lives become perceptible to the outside world. Here, Vivien Visentin expresses the physicality of jazz, drawing on its repertoire of movements as inspiration.

Pulse brings each dancer’s tempo and individual musicality to the stage. Their inner physical turmoil, subject to external and internal pulses, spills over into rhythmic movement. This process is represented not only through the dancers’ bodies but also through the staging: the lighting itself has own rhythm, and is an integral part of the performance.

Anthony Despras
Cellula
(2021)

Music is fundamental to jazz dance. It is also the foundation of all Anthony Despras’ works. In 2021, he created Cellula, a powerful, virile piece where the dancers express resistance to oppression with a combination of vigour and speed.

Here, jazz dance blends with the physicality of urban and club dances. It is fascinating to see how these three different styles overlap to form a cohesive energetic, urgent piece. The dancers are caught in traps which threaten their vitality and freedom, leading to numerous collisions, propulsions and off-beat movements.

Carole Bordes
Matt et Moi
(2021)

With Matt et Moi, Carole Bordes looks back on her highly personal experience of jazz dance and her pivotal meeting with Matt Mattox. With drummer, Samuel Ber, she creates a unique three-way dialogue. Moving through a range of danced body-states in line with Mattox’s technique, an integral part of her training, Bordes contrasts it with her own current practice.

Carole Bordes physically embodies various aspects of jazz dance – its sheer exuberance, technical virtuosity, sensuality and even its very essence – while exploring the ways in which the style has challenged her. She uses her body as an interface between the past and the potential future of jazz movement. She reveals the difficulties, and also the triumphs she has encountered in her own experience.

Johana Malédon
À bientôt
(2021)

After a long solo journey in Israel, Johana Malédon created À bientôt: a piece for five dancers that speaks of endings. Through lyrical, dynamic choreography, she evokes the experience of moving to a new phase, while reflecting on the past. It is an introspective work, about finding what is essential, about letting go of the past and about the possibility of new perspectives.

Malédon constantly explores movement, developing her own kind of dance, inspired both by her Guianese origins and her career in jazz dance, which she sees as the foundation for her early work.

She remains open to new styles and new experiences, ever keen to dive deeper and deeper into her art.

Romain Rachline Borgeaud
Ashes
(2021)

The words power, contrast, marginality, rebirth and explosiveness are apt to describe the work of Romain Rachline Borgeaud in this video extract. It is the last in a series of three short films entitled Barbarians. It speaks of our capacity to return to life after an ordeal, in spite of divergences and disillusionment. In the context of the Covid crisis, this work represents an attempt to find a space for the art of dance in the midst of disaster.

Romain Rachline Borgeaud always strives for a sense of contrast in his choreography, with powerful, exultant energy suddenly emerging from a dark atmosphere. Not only influenced by jazz and urban dances, his inspirations also include figures, such as Bob Fosse and Gene Kelly, the greats of American musicals. In fact, his work even resembles a musical production in its comprehensive vision. Original music, expressiveness, speed, active movements and extreme physicality are the hallmarks of his precise and resolutely vibrant work.

Patricia Greenwood Karagozian
The Spirit of Swing
(2023)

Teacher and choreographer Patricia Greenwood Karagozian has been an icon of jazz dance for several decades. In a fast-paced society, where appearances have become the driving force, her work, The Spirit of Swing, provides an opportunity to reconnect with the present moment. The musicians and dancers on stage form a kind of community, inviting the audience join them to experience the sensations of swing.

In this new work, Greenwood Karagozian draws on the spontaneousness of jazz dance. She explores individual expression within a community by working with the physicality of each dancer to emphasise their individual identity. The choreography is a conversation between conventional steps and creative impulse, and between the past and the current day. The musical score spotlights swing music, exploring its African and American origins and its power to bring together all communities.

Lhacen Hamed Ben Bella
Território
(2023)

From an atmosphere of darkness, Lhacen Hamed Ben Bella strives to shine a light on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He expresses his deep concern with questions of territory and migration through his nuanced and purposeful jazz movements, using dance in its highest form to speak about a current social and political issue.

With the dancers’ bodies as his medium, he strives to emphasise community and peace over war. Moving between fluidity and shock, technical precision and freedom, the choreographer creates a resolutely contemporary work with the vital energy of jazz. He draws on jazz dance as a means to express pain and assert demands, alternating between different musical genres. He employs the technicity and aesthetics of jazz to create a cohesive work, while bringing the best out of each individual dancer.

Jean-Claude Marignale
Meeting
(2023)

With choreography that increasingly blurs the lines between genres, Jean-Claude Marignale takes contemporary physicalities and sets them to great works of classical music to develop a new, unidentifiable style. Meeting aims chiefly to push back the envelope. It also evokes colonial history, bringing together both the tambour of his childhood, used by slaves, and the cello, a European instrument, used by slave owners. He thus creates a musical and physical dialogue, involving attention, power, love, suffering, honesty and equality.

For Jean-Claude Marignale, jazz dance has always been a means of connection and fusion: a place where he finds a balance between his Guadeloupean origins, traditional dances, jazz rock, and hip-hop. Seeing all these styles as an unbroken continuum, he likes to push back the limits of genre, combining the physicality of hip-hop with the technical precision and free spinal movements of jazz dance. Here the music binds the whole together.

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