France Dances Through New York - festival France Moves

Dance Magazine, April, 2001 by Karyn Bauer

Three decades after visiting troupes from the States gave France a taste for modern dance, New York will sample that country's most dynamic contemporary companies this spring during the new festival "France Moves." Ten French companies will fill the city's theaters from April 23 to May 6.

Sent over as a group by the Association Francaise d'Action Artistique, the cultural wing of the French foreign ministry, the choreographers chosen by festival Artistic Director Yorgos Loukos include such familiar names as Maguy Marin, who has been pleasing crowds here since 1983, when she appeared in Durham, North Carolina, at the American Dance Festival; Jose Montalvo, who dazzled audiences last year with his American premiere of Paradis, and Angelin Preljocaj, honored with a Bessie Award in 1997 for Annonciation.

The festival will include no fewer than nine U.S. premieres, including the high-tech wizardry of Philippe Decoufle, known for his orchestration of the ceremonies of the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France; the minimalist provocation of 27-year-old Boris Charmatz, whose piece Herses (une lente introduction) stunned the public when it premiered in France in 1999; and the Kafkaesque vision of Josef Nadj with his Hungarian-trained dancers in Les Veilleurs.

"Diversity," says Loukos, "is the thread that links these companies. Not only creatively, but also in terms of their ethnic origins, their style and their technique."

The companies performing during "France Moves" are representative of the flourishing world of modern dance in France, a young discipline that was sparked by the arrival of American dancers in the early 1970s, among them Carolyn Carlson and Alwin Nikolais. Carlson triumphed at the Palais Garnier in 1973 and has since settled in Paris, becoming the most Parisian of American dancers, while enthusiasm lives on for the work of Nikolais, who in his early days in France directed the country's first National Contemporary Dance Center (CNDC), in Angers, from its 1978 inception to 1981.

Only Merce Cunningham received a cold reception when he first appeared at the Theatre des Champs Elysees in 1966 and was nearly booed off the stage. "He has dishonored dance!" was one of the comments that could be read in the press following that performance. That cold reception was reversed in 1976 when, at the Avignon summer theater festival, Cunningham seduced the French, making his New York-based school an obligatory passage for young dancers in the early '80s.

"I'll never forget the time I spent in New York studying with Merce Cunningham" in 1980, reminisced 43-year-old Angelin Preljocaj, who spent eight months running between Cunningham's classes by day and the Manhattan clubs by night. "New York nights were as extraordinary and inspiring as Cunningham's classes. It was crazy, the city was unbelievably violent at the time!"

That violence can be witnessed in Paysage aprils la bataille (Scene after the battle), which Preljocaj will be presenting when he returns to the Joyce Theater. Combative yet humorous, it's constructed around an imaginary battle between the instinctive passion of Joseph Conrad and the pragmatism of Marcel Duchamp.

"What is at stake in this piece is the human body, the part of the universe where instinct and intelligence meet," Preljocaj said. "I tried to be playful, so there are serious, tragic and funny moments. It is a very physical piece but there are moments that bring us back to childhood, with little fairy tale-like touches."

For Loukos, whose work as artistic director of the Lyon Opera Ballet was instrumental in bringing Preljocaj to celebrity status in France, humor and playfulness are two elements that distinguish French dance today. In France, abstraction does still exist, but there is also a Latin element, a wittiness, a German-influenced theatricality intrinsic to the choreographers' work, he said.

"One can still see the influence of postmodernism in the construction of the pieces and the choreographic structure," Loukos said, "but the approach today is so personal, one can't easily categorize their current creations."

One example of that playfulness can be seen in the work of Philippe Decoufle, who has remained the most loyal to the teachings of Nikolais, under whom he studied at the CNDC in Angers. Like "Nik," Decoufle uses mesmerizing special effects, body-deforming costumes and video clips. His approach is based on illusion and magic, as in his latest multimedia extravaganza, the vaudevillian Shazam!, which his company, DCA, will be presenting at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Decoufle differs from Nikolais through his passion for the circus, a discipline that first attracted him early in the 1970s. "I always wanted to be on stage," said Decoufle, "and the circus was the perfect place to start." He evolved from the circus to dance during the early years of his career when dance was exploding onto the scene in France, yet the circus arts remain essential to Decoufle's style, an "acrobatic circus touch, funny, childlike and burlesque!" Loukos said.