Madeleine Fournier Branle

[Dance]

Viewing the ball as an eminent manifestation of the collusion entre music and dance, Madeleine Fournier takes her inspiration from the branle, a popular European dance dating back to the Renaissance. Musicians and dancers alike lead an alchemic ball, a shock-filled stroll, and ballet of the emotions.

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.