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Beyond Words

“Ulysse” – Josette Baïz and the gifts of today’s un-classic ballet [By Tracy Danison]

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“Ulysse”, performance Groupe Grenade. Photo © LéIo Ballani


O! Muse!
apart, the only words I remember from the Odyssey, blind Homer’s adventures of Ulysses after the destruction of Troy, is the epithet “rosy-fingered Dawn”.

I’ve been sweetly bouncing off it since I first heard it. Dawn’s long, flexed, pale-pink fingers on the pillow, her tapering index, a bit of red polish stuck to the nail, her, somehow, competent thumb, her closed mouth, somehow, smiling. A morning as calm as Dawn’s breathing, a world outside as easy as her body here inside with me, asleep.

The sense of bouncing sweetly off was my first experience as Josette Baïz’ child-performed version of acclaimed choreographer and dancer Jean-Claude Gallotta’s 1981 Ulysse unfolded on the stage at Carreau du Temple the other evening, a demonstrator part in the dance festival Faits d’Hiver’s 2025 memory and remembrance theme.

Ulysse is an – is, maybe, the – Ur-choreography of la nouvelle danse française (contemporary dance in France). Josette Baïz, like Gallotta, a winner of Jaque Chaurand’s Concours de Bagnolet (1982), was one of the original performers of the piece.

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“Ulysse”, performance Groupe Grenade. Photo © LéIo Ballani

In 1989, Baïz went to work with children in the immigrant-dominated north suburbs of Marseille and, in 1992, she founded the child-centered choreographic development Groupe Grenade, working with children from 6 to 18 on contemporary, urban and traditional dance. Groupe Grenade also did Ulysse in 2007.

A loose and refreshing ballet pour demain (“ballet for tomorrow”), as they said back then, Ulysse has everything a body loves in classic ballet: elegant arms stretching high, smoothly pumping legs, whirling, twirling, pointing, leaping eyes, fingers, fingers, breasts, bellies, knees to toes. Internal energies of body and mind made visible.

But Ulysse is and was (at the very least, one of the first examples of) un-classic ballet. Un-classic ballet is a movement-centered version of “modern dance”, a ballet pour demain, a nouvelle danse française, but is, especially, a “contemporary dance” that is, at its heart, an expression of an individual or group of individuals, on this occasion, on 24 January 2025, as we experienced it at Carreau du Temple, today’s dance.  

Contemporary dance fits with time differently than classic ballet. Ballet operates outside of time, is meant as the Platonic, the eternal, the perfect. Contemporary dance makes its own time; today’s dance is meant to be the flow of a moment, more or less, I reckon, à la Heraclitus.

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“Ulysse”, performance Groupe Grenade. Photo © LéIo Ballani

And, if hard to put into words, the difference between classic ballet and contemporary dance is a very real experience. If a circa 1877 Swan Lake fills a stage with the vision and emotion of a story, the 1981 Ulysse fills a space with movement and individual expression. If, like classic ballet, today’s dance – contemporary dance – is complex and challenging, contemporary dance is somebody’s real-body-to-somebody else’s-real body. Contemporary dance is intimate, intra-reactive, not, like classic ballet, gesture to gesture, not call and response. In contemporary dance, even synchronization is improvisation.

But most of all, as I sit watching Baïz’ child-danced Ulysse, I remember that contemporary dance is an avatar of the world people aspired to live in the “after 1968”. From memory, iconic slogans such as Sous les pavées, la plage and Il est interdit d’interdire, are calls for more expression: more equality, less authority, more pleasure.

The far-reaching culture initiatives of François Mitterand’s presidency, which began in 1981, including the unique (in the world, I believe) regional dance centers (CCN) set up in 1984, have socio-cultural complements in the abolition of the death penalty, the creation of a 39-hour workweek, higher minimum wages and enhanced income assistance; in what contemporary dance carries as an expression of culture.

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“Ulysse”, performance Groupe Grenade. Photo © LéIo Ballani

The long-drive for “child-centered learning” and against corporal punishment in schools took firm cultural and institutional shape in the 1980s. And, as I watch child-danced Ulysse, it is the social achievement  of that drive forward that I am seeing in it that gives me the deepest pleasure.

Disciplined, earnest, practiced and concentrated, the children of Baïz’ Groupe Grenade express themselves as childrenbetween 8 and 12 years old – that’s what they are, after all, children between 8 and 12 years old, not apprentices, learners.

Among them, not a trace of strain or suffering. No bared teeth, no fearful grimaces.

And, as I congratulate Josette Baïz on the performance, I reflect that her Groupe Grenade is still going strong and that over almost 40 years she must have had hundreds, even thousands of youngsters who have learned un-classic ballet, contemporary dance.

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“Ulysse”, performance Groupe Grenade. Photo © LéIo Ballani

And after learning, most of them have gone off to do other things elsewhere in society.

So, contemporary dance has given each one of the child dancers of Groupe Grenade, past and present, the experience of creating time, initiating, responding, synchronizing, improvising, expressing themself as themselves and as themselves. They’ve brought that experience, will bring that experience forward into the world.

Good news when there isn’t so much to go around.

Thanks, Josette Baïz, for the gift of children dancing as children.

_________

I saw Ulysse by Jean-Claude Gallotta, with original music by Henry Torgue & Serge Houppin, as adapted by Josette Baïz with assistance from Stéphanie Vial, Jeanne Vallauri, Sinath Ouk and Camille Cortez, on 24 January 2025 at Carreau du Temple. The piece was performed by members of Groupe Grenade, all between  8 and 13 years old, including Nour Belmekki, Jules Bertolo, Margaux Bourrel, Elena Chevereau, Ella Christophers, Manon Collins, Anatole Derieux, Marius Duseaux-Olive, Lilas Lautrey, Chiara Menard, Issam Ousseini, Antoine Palazzo, Olivia Rothschild, Salomé Rudloff, Maxence Siol, Lise-Marie Sumian, Sandro Villena. Claudine Ginestet was costumer, Lucas Borg handled sound and Erwann Collet did lighting and staging.

Ulysse de Jean Claude Gallotta” a study of the historic choreography by journalist Nathalie Yokel, part of the “Collection Chefs-d’oeuvre de la danse”, editor Philippe Verrièle, is available from publishers micadanses-Paris/Nouvelles Éditions Scala, Paris.


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