Peggy Oulerich’s traditional end-of-year performance will be presented at the end of May at the La Chapelle Theatre. Encounter with a committed and passionate choreographer, pioneer of contemporary dancing in Saint-Martin and Sint Maarten.
Peggy Oulerich and dancing share a long-standing love story. Gymnast from an early age, she rapidly tried ballet and modern jazz that she practiced in New Caledonia and in Senegal where she grew up. Once a teenager, she found out about contemporary dancing thanks to a visiting expert coming to her dancing school and she fell in love with it, she tells us. “It was a revelation”. Peggy Oulerich was then training to become a P.E. professor when she specialized in contemporary dancing. At 18 years old, she moved to Paris to continue her studies and joined the Sans Dessus Dessous dance company where she honed her skills as a choreographer. Thanks to the Centre Chorégraphique National in Créteil, she was able to work with numerous
great choreographers such as José Montalvo, Dominique Hervieux or even Maguy Marin. “I realized that I had no interest in becoming a dancer”, Peggy Oulerich says. “What I really liked what the construction, the message, the scenography, the dancer’s body and what you can do with it”. Then the young woman started to create choreographies for the company, before finally becoming its director.
DEVELOPING CONTEMPORARY DANCING
In 2007, after spending vacations in Saint-Martin, she settled there. Even if she had always thought about going back to live in Africa, by returning to Senegal, she thought she would have nothing to bring there. “There were already great Senegalese choreographers that worked well”, she explains. “In Saint-Martin and Sint Maarten, there was no contemporary dancing at all. And I was able to find, with the Caribbean touch, the African touch that was so dear to me”. Peggy Oulerich met Clara Reyes, who was at the time head of the Imbali Center for Creative Movement, and she asked if she wanted to work with her. For more than 10 years, first at Imbali then at the National Institute of Arts, both women worked together and “created bridges between contemporary and Caribbean and African dances. We have trained dancers from A to Z in all kinds of dances. I have very animalistic dance moves, very grounded. There, I have found an ability in bodies, different from what I had known in the mainland, but also an American style, a bit like a showman style”. Today some of the youngsters trained by Peggy Oulerich have an international career. Something to be proud of for the choreographer who has always had an unwavering commitment to “bringing the youth towards a real artistic profession”.
With her company, the Peggy Ö Company, Peggy Oulerich went on for years with both pedagogical and social projects, but also profitable ones with large-scale shows in casinos and hotels. But always with the idea of conveying “something substantial, to get out of this gendered body pattern, sexy body, that you often find here”, she adds. In 2011, she joined the HeadMade Factory collective whose objective was to promote contemporary art on the island throughout artists cooperation in various disciplines.
After Hurricane Irma in 2017, Peggy Oulerich had to reinvent herself, like many people. She became the director of the COBRACED non-profit organization, which carries education and social programs for the youth, and she kept on transmitting her passion for dancing through classes and workshops. In her show scheduled on May 27th and 28th at the La Chapelle Theatre, the choreographer will again give us her view of the world through dancing, the relationship to the body, to the other, to the woman with gravity and poetry.
Show of contemporary dance of Company Ö
Friday May 27th and Saturday May 28th, 7 pm
Théâtre La Chapelle, Orient Bay
Tickets : 17€ adults, 12€ children under 10 years old
Comentários