Christine Bastin is a co-founder, with Orianne Vilmer, of Fabrique de la Danse, where Bastin has been artistic director and Vilmer has been director since 2015. Fabrique de la Danse was the first and remains the only dance school currently able to deliver a professional certification for choreographers.
Bastin calls herself a “dance native” and says she does not remember a time when she did not dance. She began dancing at 7 or 8 years old and was among the first graduates of Danse Création, an innovative contemporary dance performance school in the northern city of Lille, a brainchild of the charismatic dancer and teacher Anne-Marie Debatte (1918-2002), which opened its doors in 1975. Dance Création philosophy and mission were to educate and train “strong, joyful and responsible beings in relation with others and present in the world”.
Debatte was among the pioneers in opening (or re-opening) dance to encompass and include human difference with intergenerational dance, dance for seniors and persons with disabilities as well as promoting dance in schools, businesses and public institutions such as senior living. Currently an associate at the coaching and well-being consultancy Optimé Persona, Christine Bastin has made this openness to movement activities and publics a significant part of her career.
“Lessons in dance were lessons in living,” Christine Bastin tells me. Her teachers and fellow students were a second family. She learned, she says, “not just to dance but also to put on a show, to teach and to create”, all the skills that she continues to use to this day.
For Bastin, dance is a spiritual resource. She describes it almost as a demiurge or spirit guide. “Dance was always there for me,” Bastin says. “It made me happy. It made it possible to express the joy I felt within myself. Dance is the creation of the world. Movement is living. If we leave it alone, dance will join [the split in] our body and mind”.
I ask her, To what end? Where does dance lead us?
She replies, “I’m looking for a transcendence. I think we are all looking for a transcendence.” When transcendence comes, she says, we won’t have the words for it, but dance will.
Christine Bastin came on the scene when the Nouvelle Danse Française – a movement away from the formalisms of American-style modern dance and Opera-de-Paris-style ballet – was expanding into the broad notion that has become “contemporary dance [performance]”. She joined other disciples of AlwIn Nikolaïs (an early actor in the Nouvelle Danse, a proponent of multimedia input in live performance and of “total dance” and dance as an aspect of an “art of motion” which is both message and medium, who arrived in Paris from the USA in 1968) in seeking new ways to perform and understand dance.
Bastin started dancing with choreographer Christine Gérard’s cie ARCOR. Gérard, along with Carolyn Carlson, Dominique Bagouet and Jaque Chaurand is among the best-known and most iconic movers of contemporary dance performance into the present.
Since the mid-1980s, Bastin has authored and produced more than 40 dance-performance choreographies, including guest pieces for prestigious events such as Biennale de danse de Lyon and Festival d’Avignon.
“Dance creation is a mirror of the self,” Bastin says. “Building a dance is to give form to an equilibrium which will then unbalance to bring about another equilibrium”, which equilibrium will then birth another…”. Bastin smiles pleasantly: “One dance can hide another”, in the way trains can.
In the choreographic process, she continues, movement cleans up the original thought or idea behind it. In movement, the body has its own thought. ‘Mind-thought’ is the detonator for the ‘body-thought’” that gives real substance to dance performance.
Each of her choreographies, Bastin says, corresponds to some aspect of self-discovery, expression, opening outward or inclusion. Her Gueule du Loup (“Wolf’s Maw”), which she was invited to write for the 1992 Biennale de danse de Lyon, is an example.
Intellectually framed, as she explains it, by Federico Garcia-Lorca’s idea of duende – … “a force not a labor, a struggle not a thought”… – and with the thought of exploring the power of the unexpressed emotion such as Camilo José Cela dramatizes it in his classic The Family of Pascual Duarte, Gueule du Loup began with the question, mind-thought, “How do you express the great feeling inside you when there are no words for it”? or “How can the ‘poor in spirit’ make themselves exist?”
As Gueule du Loup responds to these questions, Bastin says, its movement, its body-thought, corresponds to “transmission to amateurs”. “The piece is simple and complex at the same time,” she explains, “But, especially, it is spiritual. To do the piece, you need technical ability, yes, but also, you need to find yourself as a dancer”.
In fact, Bastin’s involvement with Fabrique de la Danse began when Orianne Vilmer’s amateur dance performance troupe, Danse en Seine, contacted the choreographer about putting on Gueule du Loup.
Promoting and supporting dance performance has played a prominent part of Bastin’s career. She has developed and led dance promotion and sensitization programs the length and breadth of France, in the Paris suburbs and in its regions, as well as in Africa and Eastern Europe. “Dance connects us,” Bastin explains, giving me the example of an improvisational dance exercise: “Nobody has the steps or the music, but everybody has the appetite and the curiosity. Pressed by the appetite and the curiosity, the connection [that takes shape as dance] falls into place.”
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I first met Christine Bastin at the Pavillon Carré Baudoin, once a country pleasure palace and, now beautifully restored, sitting on the very-urbanized lip of the rue des Pyrénées where it meets rue de Menilmontant. Bastin was watching her students and colleagues go through the public performance for the Fabrique de la Danse’s end-of-year 2022-2023 celebration. We met again to talk about “What is dance for”? in October 2023.
Some of Bastin’s more notable creations include:
La Folia (1986), Bless (1989), Abel Abeth (1990), Grâce (1991), Gueule de loup (1992), Affame (1993), Siloé (1994), La Polka du roi (1996), La Fugue (1996), Première neige (1997), Le p’tit Bal (1996), Noce (1998), L’eau vive (1998), Be(1999), Pigeon vole (2000), Un ange à la mer (2001), Pietà (2001), Elle & Lui (2003), De la lune et de l’eau (2003), Les mots blancs (2005), Florentina (2005), Même pas seul (2006), Celui qui danse (2006), Mariam (2007), J’m’attache à toi(2008), L’Entrouvert (2008), L’eau de personne (2010), Soir d’avril (2011), Fruition (2013), Cette parcelle de trésor(2013), Danse avec mon père (2014) and Noce l’invisible (2022).
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Author: Paul Tracy DANISON
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