The Frères Jacques’ song recounts the loves of a girl whose beloved dies at war. The pictures are in black and white. The couple rolls in a field, ignorant of the time that passes and the loves on borrowed time. Playful, their embraces have the radiance of the sun that softens a horizon too dark to be really seen. 

We are familiar with the attraction that the element of earth has always exerted on the couple Andreas Schmid and Nathalie Pernette. Crumbly, muddy, it receives them when they fall and covers their bodies. When, later, the recumbent man appears to sleep, we have doubts as to that blood red trickle flowing from his mouth. We are like Barbara, in a turned-around time. We think of the Rimbaud’s Dormeur du Val (The Sleeper of the valley). And we understand the earth, present from the first to the last shot, not as a landscape but as a refuge.

Source : Fabienne Arvers

Challenge, blows received, given, hand to hand with the invisible, a raw energy carved by meticulous movements.

As well as manipulating others' bodies to capture their articular mobility, Nathalie Pernette anchors movement in spontaneity, the emotional discharge fed by interior sensation.

In this dancer-choreographer, classically trained since childhood, dance is nimbly embodied, verylintense and angular. Instinct and discipline against a background of permanent enquiry. Her time at Françoise and Dominique Dupuy's school only confirmed this zeal.

After working for twelve years with Andréas Schmid, she founded her own company in 2001 and kept up the repertoire of earlier works.

Whether out and about in town or on stage, Nathalie Pernette is always alert, always testing her theories, pursuing her obsessions. At length, with passion and with that dose of lucidity befitting a true researcher's spirit that is never satisfied. Over sixteen years and sixteen shows (six of which were in partnership with Andréas Schmid), Nathalie Pernette has turned work into a virtue.

Further information

compagnie-pernette.com

Updating: November 2010

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