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Beyond Words

The Great Chevalier Tour: trough of inspiration for USA folklore ballet? [By Tracy Danison]

1.Pigeondance© Arnaud Bouvier
"The Great Chevalier Tour", reaching for the sky for Luxemburg, Le Grand Chevalier. Photo © Arnaud Bouvier


As part of the premier of The Great Chevalier Tour, M. Chevalier chose the Vanves, France, City Hall salle du marriage for his historic homage to Ballet National Folklorique du Luxembourg the iconic Danse du Pigeon, the trembling heart of the legendary ballet’s founders’, sisters Joséphine and Claudine Bal’s, signature ballet, Josiane la Paysanne (“Josiane the female Peasant”).

The Danse du Pigeon sequence of Josiane is today recognized as the paradigm of Western folklore ballet, was developed and premiered 50 years ago to the very day and under the very same gaze of the very monumental bust of Marianne mounted on today’s back wall.

 

4.Pigeondance©Tracy
Detail of panel, “Owl with Minerva”, Vanves City Hall, salle du mariage”. Note the clouds. Photo © Tracy Danison

The Bal sisters are said to have been inspired to the Danse du Pigeon choreographic riff by the symbolic owl in the emblematic Minerva figuring on the marriage salle’s central ceiling vault, painted there by the same 19th century artist who did the original cityscapes still decorating the walls, most of which are recognizable today, the city’s mayor said during his opening allocution. The sisters Bal, while native Luxemburgers to the core, worked in nearby Brussels, Belgium. The Vanves mayor, a strikingly attractive man, said his southwest Paris suburb had welcomed the celebrated sisters when devastating floods had temporarily destroyed their more northerly dance atelier, raising some sympathy among the evening’s spectators.  

Dancer (and remarkable prancer) M. Chevalier, dit “Le Grand Chevalier”, also co-director of the National Ballet Folklorique, performed Danse du pigeon upon the parquet between the salle’s antique oak Magistrate’s Bench and a rapt audience.

Le Grand Chevalier’s aplomb, in addition to the elegant en tête bobbling, sidewise en pointe stepping and abruptefancy flights that characterize the celebrated fortress nation’s most renowned dance, included a dramatic evocation of the history and national plomb of the celebrated dukedom.

 

2.Pigeondance© Arnaud Bouvier
Position #3.5 from celebrated “Wings high” sequence, Le Grand Chevalier, “Danse du Pigeon”. Photo © Arnaud Bouvier

The multi-talented co-director was able, through states of undress, including modestly bare shoulders and breasts, a family-style codpiece, multiple revisions of the Iconic dance’s bobbles, pointes, grand jetés, along with enthusiastic audience participation in the symbolic gestures of skyward national ambition, to well characterize the Luxemburg spirit: “Growing like grass, blooming as buds”, as he might well put it.

In the air of the salle, as that truly throbbing Le Grand Chevalier made his final emotional, deeply personal salute, wrapping himself in a magnificent rug of many horses and thus pointing the many grand Chevaliers or Ritters or Horse Soldiers that have pockmarked the little fortress nation’s history, was a growing feeling, in warmer patriotic hearts, that the USA too must have their own Danse du Pigeon written into their iconic ballet, Winning Karen Winning.

Unfortunately, USA pigeons, are now extinct by necessity as well as national right and nature’s red-toothed law. They became, as historians note, the delicious squab that enabled my ancestors to build the limitless farms, factories and penitentiaries that have so long welcomed the rest.

 

3.Pigeondance© Arnaud Bouvier
Under Marianne's gaze, Monsieur Le Maire de Vanves, Bernard Gauducheau, in presence of co-director Simone Mousset, pays homage to sisters Joséphine and Claudine Bal, founders of Ballet National Folklorique du Luxembourg. Photo © Arnaud Bouvier

Reminded that “squab”, “a nestling tumbling to the ground, fat and flabby, a richly slapping sound” reminds of those iconic offerings emblematic of true American contribution, that are, as Lord Byron has put it, “soft, yet cohesive, neither rashly swift nor insolently slow”:  The Turd.

Thus, as spectators filed pensively out of this salle of homage in Vanves, France, they thought, with love and pride, of course, of production values much bigger and better than diminutive Luxemburg could ever offer, for the USA: Dance of the Turd… With its own historic music, Central Park in the Dark by Charles Ives… A modernist composer, yes, but also, and in his actual lifetime, a bigly successful salesman and insurance entrepreneur. 

Simone Mousset, does that eminently American “The” in the English title, The Grand Chevalier Tour, suggest that M. Chevalier himself might be tempted, munificently, as so many others, to perform the sure-to-be-a-classic Great American Dance of the Turd?

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Performance Detail

I saw the premier of “The Great Chevalier Tour” – billed as the “Occasion for Monsieur Chevalier to visit all the places which have contributed to the success of the Ballet National Folklorique, with this love letter, tender and intimate, addressed as much to the people of Vanves as to Luxemburg, and danced by one of its most talented prodigal sons” – 7 March 2025 at Mairie de Vanves, in presence of Monsieur Le Maire de Vanves, Bernard Gauducheau. “The Great Chevalier Tour” is the brainchild of choreographer performer Simone Mousset, written by Lou Cope
with historic music composed and recorded by Maurizio Spiridigliozzi and set plan by Mélanie Planchard in collaboration with Simone Mousset and Lewys Holt.

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Festival Artdanthé

Simone Mousset’s “The Grand Chevalier Tour” premiered the 2025 edition of Artdanthé, founded in 1998, a mixed-discipline dance-performance festival featuring, especially, creations by emerging artists. Notable Artdanthé alumni include Boris Charmantz, named director of the Tanztheater Wuppertal in 2022, and Jeanne Candel, whose latest work was discussed in Best American Poetry/Beyond Words in September 2024 (Rockets, space, place, sets and the power of theater: Jeanne Candel’s “Fusées”).


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