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Ballet Atlantique-Regine Chopinot
Opening Essay Introducing the Artists Links and Readings
Hester Reeve Basia Irland


 

Végétal
©Tristan JEANNE-VALES Agence Enguerand
with permission from BARC

 

La Danse du Temps
©Tristan JEANNE-VALES Agence Enguerand
with permission from BARC

The choreographer Régine Chopinot, with her company Ballet Atlantique - Régine Chopinot, has brought the rhythms of nature, of generation and falling away, and of deep, geomorphological time into contemporary theatre-based dance. In her engagement with the elements and the spirit of the natural world, Chopinot has created works with a demanding simplicity, slow meditations in real time using natural materials, on the structures and processes of nature.

For two works, she has collaborated with the sculptor Andy Goldsworthy :
Végétal, created 1995
La Danse du Temps, created in 1999

‘I respond to dance more than other forms of theatre.  Dance is more sculptural. It deals with the stuff of the body, more abstract, the essence of movement.  My work is a way of releasing an energy which is there. Régine releases movement. Appearing as if an external force is making the movement - somehow over-riding the mind of the dance, it takes control. That for me is the essence of movement.’ Andy Goldsworthy

Végétal

Choreography : Régine Chopinot
Set design : Andy Goldsworthy
Sound design : Knud Viktor
Lighting : Maryse Gautier

for 15 and 13 dancers

The dance is composed of five parts, in each of which the dance incorporates the creation of evolving sculptures using materials of the natural world, in movements which are between the choreographed and the spontaneous. The stage is circumscribed by the slow pace of Chopinot herself walking, marking real time.

from the book accompanying Végétal:

Earth / terre : dust throws of red earth

‘Breathing rhythm is a gradual awakening, rocking, to and fro, inhaling and exhaling, the body forging itself and melting.’ Régine Chopinot      

Seed / graine : the building and falling of balanced rocks

‘Stone has shown me many things about the structure of growth. I have found an energy in stone that can be best described as a seed that becomes taut as it ripens - often needing only the slightest of touches to make it explode and scatter its parts. The precariousness of a balanced column is like the fine edge between success and failure - the tension of growth.’ Andy Goldsworthy    

Root / racine : dancers responding to a background of dried ferns glued to a canvas, forming a snake-like pattern.

‘I have used the sounds of worms in wood, which I discovered one day - there were about a dozen worms communicating with each other in a percussion-like way. If one worm changed the type of signal, all the others followed. The whole piece is arranged, composed, but the natural sounds are kept as they are.’  Knud Viktor

Branch / branche : the dancers build a circular nest from branches

‘Methodical, harmonious, the wood finds its place and places me in its rings.  As my grandmother would say, working is doing and undoing. Végétal is work with wood. Wood is an energy element which extends past me, passes through me, builds me.  The memory in my cells of the gestures that shaped my dancers body.’ Régine Chopinot

Leaf / feuille : a leaf throw within a circle of branches

‘I choreographed ‘Leaf’ as a sculpture, with the dancers’ energy as the material. In a stormy state, the body accepts the wind, its open gaze directed inwards. Bodies swirl in circles, turning until they fall. The tree is bare, loses its foliage, turns back within itself. Full cycle.’ Régine Chopinot

La Danse du Temps

Choreography : Régine Chopinot
Film-Set Design : Andy Goldsworthy
Sound design music composer: Tôn-Thât Tiêt
Lighting : Régis Montambaux

for 16 dancers between the ages of 20 and 75

The work is a meditation on time and its symbolic associations with water, and on age and generations - alteration, loss and renewal.
The work is in three parts:

the human time on earth
the time of the universe
the time that is lost, forgotten or absent

The image of the river and the perceptions of time are constantly present in all of Chopinot’s work.

The river inspired Tôn-Thât Tiêt to return to the music and sounds of his native Vietnam, back to the River of Perfumes and the boatmen’s songs of his childhood. His score refers to three ‘times’ – linear time, cyclical time, and non-time.

The river inspired Andy Goldworthy to create the silt river stage set. Goldsworthy’s film of his work ‘Earth River’, is projected onto the stage. In the film, a wall of clay dries to reveal the serpentine path of a water course. This image draws on the essence of time through the slow process of its cracking. On the stage floor was an undulating strip of red silt. 

Chopinot invited the dancers Françoise and Dominique Dupuy and Sophie Lessard to join the company, uniting three generations of contemporary dancers. In her choreography, Chopinot uses walking, running, jumping, falling, trances and immobility to create a primal dance – a work on rhythms and the cross-over of one mood to another.

‘I am deeply interested in how a dancer’s body can portray the kind of expansion that exists between actual time and the experience provided by the performance, providing the audience with a different perception of time up to the point where they no longer know whether they have just seen a performance that lasted three hours or only a second. This ‘unawareness of time’ fascinates me.’

Ballet Atlantique-Régine Chopinot creates a full and varied repertoire of contemporary dance.

Contact

e : regine.chopinot at wanadoo.fr
a :
14 rue du Collège
17025 LA ROCHELLE Cédex  01
France
t : 05.46.41.17.75

Notes on text

The quoted text on Végétal has been taken from the booklet published and copyright by Ballet Atlantique-Régine Chopinot, [1996, ISBN 2904893016] reprinted with permission. 

Photo Credit

The photographs are copyright of Tristan JEANNE-VALES Agence Enguerand, and have been provided with permission by Ballet Atlantique-Régine Chopinot

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