“Labourer”: it had been a long time since we had heard this verb, when Madeleine Fournier chose to make it the title of her first solo, created in 2018. And it only took one word for we jumped with both feet into this young choreographer’s field and campaigned with her around all the meanings of this agricultural term.
With this leaping piece centered on the pas de couverture, a figure of traditional and classical dance, Madeleine Fournier imposed her mischievously unstable silhouette, jumping from one foot to the other, clicking her soles while twirling her gloves as red as her cheeks and her gloss. “Red is a color that can have several meanings and in particular evoke blood,” she confides. Furthermore, as a child, I blushed easily, and painting myself red allows me to hide and reveal at the same time this emergence of intimacy linked to emotion, desire, shame or physical effort. »
Madeleine Fournier speaks simply and frankly. Of her, of the body, of the feminine… The opening page of her website highlights a Greek Baubo sculpture, legs spread, one hand on her penis. “She is a figure from mythology linked to the mysteries of Eleusis and Demeter, who combines truth, laughter and joy by showing her genitals,” she explains. I like something that can evoke several things at the same time. » As in Labourer, where she explores from behind the back different physical states around the question of cycles, those of plants, animals, humans…
“Let the gestures rise”
This extra-wide plowing, for which Madeleine Fournier was introduced to the traditional three-step soufflé, as part of the Les Brayauds association, based in Saint-Bonnet-près-Riom (Puy-de-Dôme), has gave the impetus to Branle, his new opus, for eight performers, which is rooted in the two-time pourée. “It consists of a double line of dancers who face each other and move closer and further apart,” she describes. No physical contact between them, because there are no arm movements, but a lot of leg movements. » She worked, as did the performers, with Solange Panis, an expert in traditional Berry dances and songs.
With the ball, its circle, its excitement and its desire for intoxication under its belt, she adds: “It will be less a question of inventing new movements than of letting the gestures and affects of our collective unconscious rise, or, as says Carl Gustav Jung, “the deposit constituted by all ancestral experience over millions of years”. » As for the presence of two live musicians on set, she underlines how “liberating” this exploration was. “During my studies at the Paris Conservatory, I learned to dissociate dance and music,” she comments. It’s exciting, but I’m happy to have rediscovered this musical engine and its fusional and emotional power. »
Madeleine Fournier’s trajectory is based on solid learning. After the National Conservatory of Music and Dance in Paris, she continued with the National Center for Contemporary Dance in Angers. She subsequently collaborated with various choreographers, including Odile Duboc (1941-2010) and Loïc Touzé. From the first, about which “she thinks a lot”, she retains “the work on the poetry of matter, water, fire, and the fact that by remaining human bodies we can relate to other elements, including plants.” Of the second, with which she continues to dialogue, she evokes the way “in which it allows everyone to develop the imagination of their own dance”. In duo with Jonas Chéreau for eight years, from 2008 to 2016, Madeleine Fournier honed her creative tools based on experience. She then founded her company, which she named Odetta. “It’s a woman’s name, a sort of alter ego, something between vendetta and Odette from Swan Lake,” she slips.
Collaborations multiples
From her “source location, the Creuse”, where she has spent all her holidays since the age of 6 and where she continues to stay, Madeleine Fournier, like many young artists of her generation, develops ecological thinking. With the body as a communicating vessel connected to the outside world, whether plant or mineral, she designs La Chaleur (2021), around the breath of the voice “which mixes in the air and connects us to the invisible”. She cites among her reference works The Life of Plants, by Emanuele Coccia (Rivages, 2016), and questions the way in which “we constantly cross and are crossed by the bodies of others”.
She responds by increasing the number of meetings. In 2019, as part of Long Live the Subject!, at the Avignon Festival, she created with Ina Mihalache, author of the “SolangeTeParle” videos on YouTube, the duo Ce jardin, on the theme of “sorority and the fight for achieve this in a patriarchal society that puts women in competition.” At the request of the Arlt group, made up of Eloïse Decazes and Florian Caschera, she created the choreography for the music video for their title Les Fleurs (2020), where she this time wears green gloves.
And, as she likes to change air and space, to play indoors and in gardens, she imagined a dance-sung duo entitled Zwei palmitos, with Catherine Hershey, who has been traveling since 2018 to all the places that will please. welcome it, from the jazz club to the art gallery. With, whatever the collaborations, the quest for the origin of the gesture and the desire to dance, which she places in childhood. “I remember being a kid who moved around a lot, spinning and jumping everywhere,” she says. It’s this dizziness, this pleasure, this way of giving yourself sensations by experiencing movement that I’m trying to rediscover. »
