Lilith Borchert
Creating a dance piece for a young audience: How do you start?
Impressions from the choreography workshop of Bérengère Valour.
You have a minute! Write down everything that comes to mind about the term ‘dance’. Then to the term ‘creation’. Then to ‘childhood’.
Quickly, an association carpet of yellow-bright post-its spreads on the dance floor, reflecting the breadth and diversity of the theme that will be addressed in the two-day workshop.
As part of the Offensive Tanz, PURPLE – international dance festival for young audiences invited for the first time to a workshop for choreographers on 1 and 2 April. The workshop was led by Bérengère Valour, dancer and choreographer and specialist in dance creation and dance pedagogy for young audiences.
Sensitive, keen to experiment, practice-oriented and based on the ideas of the participants, Bérengère Valour navigated the group on the two workshop days through various compositional tasks, dance plays and group works. The cut straight dance, creation and childhood always gave orientation, but also occasion for lively discussion.
What makes a good deal for young audiences? How do children see dance? What arouses their curiosity and keeps their attention? How can we learn from children's eyes and what ideas for choreography can we develop from them?
Again and again the participants switched between the roles of the creators, the dancers, the spectators. The process of a piece development was thus illuminated from different perspectives, reflected on, and even tried out. Different working methods and compositional approaches emerged, which formed an imaginative pool of choreographic tools and aids.
Bérengère Valour often chose (everyday) objects and materials as starting points for choreographic studies and as inspiration for the development of movement materials. Everything is included, from aluminium foil, toothbrushes, paper planes, to self-published and self-designed ‘livres graphiques de danse’ (graphic dance books). All things that move our imagination and imagination, but also our body – can give us aesthetic dance experiences.
Bérengère Valour’s work and personal experiences shared with the group made it clear that for them, the development of the piece for a young audience is less about educating a new generation of spectators for contemporary dance, but rather about enabling young people to encounter their own bodies, to make dance tangible, to touch, to create dance moments that ideally store themselves physically and emotionally, thus preserving us for a lifetime.
The great joy of finally getting together was to be noted to all participants. The long-planned workshop for female choreographers should have taken place in January 2022. However, the pandemic reality continues to create new challenges. All the more beautiful if you are allowed to forget these, put interpersonal encounters back into focus and you can try out and exchange physically in the room together as a group. We would like to thank Bérengère for making this a success!
