Cie Les Orpailleurs: practicing the dangerous art of thought in muscle & blood, skin and bone

Jean-Christophe Bléton and Laurence Bertagnol: Dance as art  dance for all

“Failles”, Jean-Christophe Bleton, Laurence Bertagnol: Dance for all. Photo: Patrick Girard © couleursurlaville

Through their dance troupe cie Les Orpailleurs (“Gold-Panners”), Jean-Christophe Bleton and Laurence Bertagnol run an annual open dance program called Groupe de recherche chorégraphique Intergenerationnel et participative. GRCIP, for short. The course, which includes participants ranging in age from six to sixty-nine, is one among the different choreographic initiatives sponsored by Micadanses, about whose Bien Fait program, among other things, I wrote at the end of last year: Micadanses: Try some of this Surprise. Tastes like Imagination.

At the beginning of this past Summer, cie Les Orpailleurs presented a tight and charming 15-minute dance performance called Failles, Chemins de Lumière* (“Cracks, ways to light”) at Micadanse’s annual (mostly) amateur Fait Maison program. Failles mixed amateur dancers under 12 and over 60 so well that it got me wondering whether older folk have positive age-specific qualities, so I decided to talk about it with Bleton and Bertagnol.

I got my thinking redirected and gained a better perspective in the process.  

Oldridingyoung

“Failles” Photo: Patrick Girard©couleursurlaville

And not difference in the way I’ve mostly thought of it, either.

As I listened to them, I realized that, born in mid-twentieth century America, some “difference” or another has been a life-theme: from difference within my clan and family to religion, race, status and economic difference, and, God knows, more, in society and culture as a whole. For me difference has been lines in the sand to erase, problems to be solved. I hacked through “difference” with politics, murmuring, “equality”.

In the early 80s, I even joined the democratic socialists. And that was that. Until, one day, in my later twenties, I met this girl from another country, another religion and another color. I liked this girl and she me. One day, she asked, What do you think of me? I said, a bit too breezily, “Why, you’re like me”.

She exploded like Donald Duck catching Huey, Dewey and Louie reading science fiction while circle-jerking: “I am not like you. I am like me.”

Politics has no answer to “you and me”. My personal solution to difference as felt by my sweet friend’s felt and inscrutable Otherness has been to pull the covers up over my head and mumble something… nice, if I can.

Bleton and Bertagnol don’t have any definitive answer to the ineffable difference inovolved in human Otherness, either, but in how they understand and practice dance they’ve developed a pertinent approach to dealing with it.

First off, for them, “difference” isn’t a problem to solve, it’s a solution to embrace. Realizing one’s own Otherness is a way to own it. In owning it one can at least relate with that apparently blocking “I am not like you. I am like me.”

Dance, which Bleton calls its own language and Bertagnol characterizes as “access to a sensorial, organic, and alternate reality of pensée incarnée ”, is a way to own one’s difference.

Clem@Laurence

Dance research. Photo ©Cie Les Orpailleurs

The long-time partners agree, too, that “dance is a dangerous art” because it is free, and belongs only to the person who practices it. “That’s why contemporary dance scares people,” says Bleton. “It lets you conquer your own freedom”.

His, Bertagnol’s, work in dance, Bleton says, boils down to a “political commitment to democratize it, to bring it to people who, for whatever reason, might not otherwise have access to it.”

Though their terminology and goals – indeed, the whole self-expression side of contemporary dance performance can seem to run very close to the language of therapy – the pair are very clear that their concern is dance, the art. Bertagnol notes that individual motivations for joining GRCIP programs may range from trying to deal with body shame, to the pleasure of being in a group project, to self-liberation, to the pure pleasure of dancing, but her and her friend and partner’s goal is to give access to the art of dance. In the same ways, perhaps, as older professionals bring their professional experience to bear, Bertagnol continues, amateurs bring their life experience to dance.

The GRCIP approach works in spite of handicaps such as the widespread belief that contemporary dance is for nobs only – “If we were doing hip hop, recruiting might be easier,” Bertagnol observes – but barriers persist also in the form of masculine gendering and beliefs about “what is appropriate for a person like me”.

The groups that have come together, Bleton says, are resilient: “Groups do adjust to a lot of coming and going, the ebb and flow of normal life – kids who change schools or who enter a new life stage with new goals or younger adults who blend into work and family life.” And the groups last as they transform: they follow on each other through time, through individuals, through families and through generations, diversifying socio-cultural origins and horizons as families diversify. No matter the particular make up of a group, Bleton concludes, it always finds a communion in the effort to define itself in front of its audience.

I’m going to give Jean-Christophe Bleton’s and Laurence Bertagnol’s Groupe de recherche chorégraphique Intergenerationel et participative a try this year. How about you?  

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The GRCIP is open to a free try.

For Fall 2022 the dates are as follows:

  • 1 October from 16:00 to 19:00 Micadanses, Room :Noces
  • 29 October from 16:00 to 19:00 Micadanses, Room :Noces
  • 19 November from 16:00 to 19:00 Micadanses, Room :May B
  • 10 December from 16:00 to 19:00 Micadanses, Room :Noces

For more information

Groupe de recherche chorégraphique Intergenerationnel et participative

For dates in 2023, contact Micadanses

For other GRCIP dates and other courses at Micadanses: Micadanses

*Failles, Laurence Bertagnol & Jean-Christophe Bleton, cie Les Orpailleurs 

“Il y a une fissure en toutes choses, c’est ainsi qu’entre la lumière” – Anthem, Leonard Cohen

There is a crack, a crack in everything /That’s how the light gets in … Anthem, Leonard Cohen

In collaboration with the student dance program at collège Politzer de Bagnolet
Music and performance: Guillaume Bleton/ Production: cie les Orpailleurs/ Production supports: Jocus, Conservatoire Erik Satie de Bagnolet. Performance : Micadanses, 24 June 2022

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Author: Paul Tracy DANISON