Anne Collod

Anne Collod pursued a career as a performer, working with various choreographers (Pierre Deloche, Philippe Découflé, Fabrice Ramalingom and Hélène Cathala, and Stéphanie Aubin), until her introduction to Labanotation (a system for writing and analysing movement, in which she qualified in 1993) inspired her to re-create 20th century choreographic works from scores and to cofound the Quatuor Albrecht Knust (1993-2001). Together, the group of performers, re-created many symbolic pieces, including Vaslav Nijinksky’s legendary work, L’Après-midi d’un Faune.

From 2001 onwards, while contributing to various choreographic projects, primarily with Boris Charmatz, Laurent Pichaud, Alain Michard and Cécile Proust, Anne continued to question the issues of translation, performance and transmission associated with reinterpreting 20th century choreographic works. She founded the non-profit association …& alters to combine and give form to her research, teaching, and creative projects and focus her work on ‘collective utopias’. This theme inspired her to meet Anna Halprin, the American choreographer and pioneer of post-modern dance.
Anne then worked with Halprin over a very long period of time:

• participating in an improvisation group at Sea Ranch (California) and performing in Halprin’s shows in France (at the Festival d’Automne, Musée d’Art contemporain de Lyon – Lyon Contemporary Art Museum etc.)
• creating Empreintes, a project that questions the notions of scores and processes as a basis for creating and interpreting and which is based on one of Anna Halprin’s major works (the project was awarded the Aide aux Écritures Chorégraphiques du Ministère de la Culture (Grant for Choreographic Writing from the French Ministry for Culture) in 2005
• profoundly reinterpreting Parades and Changes in dialogue with Anna Halprin and Morton Subotnick (composer and co-creator of the piece in 1965). It was created in 2008 for the Lyon Dance Biennale and presented at the Festival d’Automne in Paris. A new version of parades & changes, replays followed in 2001, entitled parades & changes, replay in expansion, which has been touring in France and abroad ever since. Parades & changes, replays won a Bessie Award in New York in 2009.
• reinterpreting Blank Placard Dance (1967) in 2016, an urban performance from Halprin’s body of work that makes protest as artistic as it is political.

In 2021, Anne Collod created CommUne Utopie, her first work for young audiences. It offers a joyful initiation into dance and performance based on Anna Halprin scores and extends the modular and participative aspects of Halprin’s work.

While working on Anna Halprin’s body of work, Anne Collod also worked on other projects. In 2010, Anne focused on the dance macabre (the dance of death) theme, and explored links between the living and the dead. In 2010-2011, her research project received the Aide à la Recherche et au Patrimoine grant from the French Ministry of Culture and was offered the Hors les Murs programme run by the Institut Française / French Ministry for Foreign Affairs, which took her to Mexico and Japan and enabled her to recreate a Danse Macabre from the 1930s by the German choreographer and teacher Sigurd Leeder. In the autumn of 2014, she created a new work from her research entitled Le parlement des invisible, which is haunted by the phantom of Sigurd Leeder’s Danse Macabre.

In 2019, Anne Collod returned to the innovative American choreographers she so loves and immersed herself in the work of Ruth Saint-Denis and Ted Shawn. Created in 2018, Moving alternatives offers a critical reinterpretation of works by the US choreographers Ruth Saint-Denis and Ted Shawn and, through the prism of the notion of gender and the concept of cultural appropriation, questions the aesthetic and political challenges of reinterpreting this body of work today.

Awarded the Aide à la Recherche et aux Écritures grant by the Centre National de la Danse in 2019, Anne Collod continued the work she had begun with her stage production Moving alternatives with the creation of Alternative bodies, a documentary web series and installation produced in collaboration with the videographer Jacques Hœpffner. Alternative bodies is based on a series of interviews and examines how representations are manufactured and how ‘the other’ is assimilated in dance.

Anne Collod is also passionate about in-situ productions and notably created (faire) cabaneart10 in 2007 with designer and performer Mathias Poisson. The in-situ production, combining visual arts and choreography for a choir of amateurs and equipment, has been presented at various festivals. In 2015, Vifs ! une danse macabre en son jardin saw a dance for the dead performed in historic sites to celebrate the deceased and the memory of the spaces. In 2017 Exposure, an immersive in-situ choreographic, sound, and light production examined the notion of energy exchange between a performer and an industrial environment.

Anne Collod is also a founding member of the collective Dingdingdong, Institut de co-production de savoir sur la maladie de Huntington (Institute for co-producing knowledge on Huntington’s disease), which unites artists, scientists and philosophers. She is the dance department creator at Institute.
Dingdingdong mobilises the many practices and skills offered by the arts and by social scientists and research and uses them to explore Huntingdon’s disease as though it were a largely unmapped and unknown world. Anne Collod is the co-creator of the performance Bons Biasers de Huntingtonland, which was presented in Rio de Janeiro in 2013 and at the Subsistances in Lyon in 2014. She also created the solo À D., a choreographic portrait of a person with Huntingdon’s disease.

Anne Collod is also qualified in the Feldenkraïs method and is regularly invited to teach at various educational establishments in France and abroad (at the Freie Universität Berlin through the prestigious Valeska Gert Professorship, on the Master’s in Dance at the Zürich Arts University and Darstellende Kunst HfMDK-MA CoDE Frankfurt, at Paris VIII University, CCN (National Choreographic Centre) in Montpellier, CNSMDP Paris (the Paris Conservatory), CDCN (Centre of French National Chorographic Development) in Toulouse, etc.