From the Vault: Janine Solane’s Notebooks, Music, Drawing and Dance

Juliette Riandey

In April, the exhibition Chorégraphies. Dessiner, danser (17th- 21st centuries) opened, exhibiting drawings, notebooks and scores produced by dancers and choreographers. Among the CND’s contributions to this exhibition, this article focuses on the choreography notebook for “La Grande Passacaille” by Janine Solane, a little-known artist and teacher whose work is marked by her fundamental relationship with painting and music.

“Choreography is a fascinating study for people who love lines, form, and the balance between empty spaces and mass”, wrote choreographer and instructor Janine Solane (1912-2006) in her book Pour une danse plus humaine (Towards a more humane dance). One of Solane’s choreography notebooks is featured in the exhibition Chorégraphies: dessiner, danser (17th-21st centuries) which opened last April in the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’archéologie in Besançon.

Janine Solane, though little-known nowadays, is a singular artist whose career and work left their mark on the French dance world before and after the Second World War. As the daughter of sculptor Louis Oury and the niece of painter Marcel Lenoir, she grew up in the artsy Montparnasse of the interwar period, and spent her entire life rubbing shoulders with writers, musicians and painters.

Having developed a highly personal choreographic language combining various influences, from free dance to ballet and expressionist dance, she first made a name for herself as a soloist, who likes to perform strong roles such as Joan of Arc. She was also an excellent group leader. Leading up to eighty dancers in her company, she was a fixture on Parisian and provincial stages well into the 1960’s, most notably at the Palais de Chaillot, from its inauguration in 1938.

The Janine Solane archives, given to the CN D by her daughter Dominique after the artist’s death, contain a large number of choreography notebooks in which the dancer conceived her work. Her choreographies, which often have a strong spiritual dimension, are characterized by a close relationship with the major works of our musical heritage.

As large-scale frescoes with a message, they appeal to a wide audience while dividing critics. Based around one or more themes, they follow an allegorical narrative, unlike other abstract pieces such as Fugue in G (1941), in which she “dances the music”, in her own words. The booklet presented here concerns one of her large-scale pieces, created on the stage of the Palais de Chaillot in 1949, with dozens of performers, to the music of Johann-Sebastian Bach’s Grande Passacaille.

The theme developed by Janine Solane in this post-war work is that of hard-working humanity, fighting against the machines. In the end, the machines are mastered, and the struggle turns into a celebration, a liberation of the body, but above all, a spiritual liberation, a path towards the sacred.

It took the choreographer many weeks to create this workbook. It begins by describing the various narrative sequences, peppered with ideas for movement. “I had to express myself through images, through allusions that would be striking shortcuts to the action”. And this action, as she explains in her book, is “built through by a logical progression in the atmosphere of the piece which matches the variations.”

Once the Passacaille plan was completed, she then designed all the movements and positions for her dancers. Each page is loaded with several superimposed layers of tracing paper corresponding to a musical sequence: “Tomorrow, I’ll start working on the second phase of the piece. That of meticulous choreography: one or two millimeters per day!” Further on, she adds: “I’ve started working again. Yesterday, I finished the side B of the second disc, which is eight minutes long. Ninety sheets of tracing paper and three weeks’ work!”

These pages of tracing paper, whose transparency makes it possible to visualize the movements to come, are entirely drawn before rehearsals start. Movements and positions are respected right up to the final version. Improvisation, which Janine Solane valued so much in her classes with her company, is not an option for this large-scale piece; the notebook presented to the dancers at the start of the first rehearsal and placed on the piano, is meant to remain the reference to which all the dancers can return during the work.

For the “birds” sequence, Janine Solane’s drawing transposes the music into lines and curves. Here, as in many of the choreographer’s works, the start of the musical phrase “seems to be the trigger point of an unfolding spiral”.

In the CN D, Juliette Riandey is head of the pôle Collections et valorisation.

Chorégraphies. Dessiner, danser (17th- 21st centuries)
Curators: Pauline Chevalier and Amandine Royer
from 19 April to 25 September
at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Besançon