In a sandy setting dominated by a sky obscured by clouds, two young women dance while staring boldly at the camera, hum the chorus and focus on forming childish figures. There is a visual haiku in this duo where a few objects sum up Boby Lapointe’s song and where the body, in a slow pendulum-like movement, finally melts into the rhythm of the words. Words cut into syllable slices, sounds placed end to end that echo and mark the minutes. The singer’s art, halfway between nursery rhyme and fable, is marvellously enhanced by the talent of the choreographer Valérie Rivière: her art of pace, interior and unsurpassed, works wonders. Filmed by Eric Legay, dance according to the Paul les Oiseaux company is indeed child’s play.

Source : Fabienne Arvers

Valérie Rivière trained as a classical dancer and then moved into contemporary dance. Thanks to her very sound initial technical training, she favoured dance which did not hide its virtuosity. From her years spent in Brussels at Mudra, she continued to uphold open-mindedness and mixing with other artistic disciplines. Incidentally, we can almost also imagine Valérie Rivière as a poet, painter, scenographer, author, landscape designer and costume designer for her own choreographies.

She first studied dance at the Conservatoire National de Région de Bordeaux (Regional Arts Conservatory) between 1974 and 1978. Then she attended the Princess Grace Dance Academy in Monte Carlo, under the direction of Marika Besobrasova, then joined Maurice Béjart’s school, the Mudra in Brussels, to become a professional dancer. During her time here she discovered she was particularly attached to choreography and was very keen on the other art disciplines which were taught there. 

On arriving back in France in 1987, Valérie Rivière founded Paul les Oiseaux with Olivier Clémentz. Over the next four years, they were engaged in laboratory work to unlearn and to develop a new language which would lead each of them to acquiring a unique signature. In 1992, Valérie Rivière became the company’s only choreographer.

She produced twenty-five choreographic works which, each in their own way, strive to embrace the world of plastic arts without ever restraining them.

Source : Paul Les Oiseaux

More information :

http://www.paullesoiseaux.com/home-fr.html

The idea has all it takes to please: with the complicity of a director, a choreographer plays along by masterfully setting to dance a melody taken from the repertoire of French song, where, most often, poetry rhymes with humour and tenderness. While none of these dances resembles a video-clip supposed to illustrate the song, they are always an original choreographic proposal. A contemporary version of the old “chansons de geste” (French epic poems), they allow access, in just a few minutes, to the highly diversified universes of the choreographers. Take a song, its verses and its chorus, the interpreter’s tone of voice, the subject or the atmosphere evoked, and see what images, colours, figures and rhythms dance could give them.

Source : Fabienne Arvers