Recreation in an extended version of Fast ein Wunder - Solo - 2022 - Duration: 30 mn

Au Hasard la Mémoire

An intimate choreographic ode

“In 1935, due to the threat of National Socialism, Gertrud Kraus immigrated to Israel, where she became one of the founders of Israeli Modern Dance. Coincidentally, my mother, as a child, lives on the same street in Tel Aviv where Kraus' dance studio is located. Attracted by the sounds of the piano that flood the street, she stands at the window overlooking the basement studio, and watches with emotion what is happening inside. Enchantment and disappointment, because her family is too poor to offer her this kind of happiness. Yet one day, Gertrud Kraus invites her to come in and take part in the lessons.

She then spends several years dancing with Kraus and enjoys a rich musical education. Kraus being a pianist graduated from the Vienna Conservatory of Music, she works her choreographies in a very musical way. It is therefore obvious for her to also transmit her musical culture.

As a young woman, my mother will be part of the “Gertrud Kraus Dance Company”. She then opened her own dance school, where I made my debut at 3 years old.”

Loulou Omer

Artistic intentions

“Au Hasard la Mémoire” is an extended recreation (30 min) of the choreographic poly-artistic piece Fast ein Wunder - Reenacting Gertrud Kraus. It is a homage to the woman whose life, passion and work were groundbreaking for my mother's artistic development - and who subsequently significantly influenced my own artistic being, my joie de vivre. At the same time, it is a tribute to my mother, who passed all of this on to me.

It is an intimate choreographic ode, the result of a ghost dialogue between Loulou Omer and Gertrud Kraus. A ghostly conversation, because the person we were talking to is no longer alive and her work has hardly left any traces. It is hearing an absence, wanting to evoke that absence, to restore the past. A life, a work, a story to act out. It is the will to create a memory out of oblivion.

Several temporalities intertwine, that of re-enactment and that, one imagines or feels, like an embodied state of traces that would have been left before I could even remember. I then rely more on this vague state of pre-speech, like a return to a prenatal circumstance but time-charged, of a still inarticulate past and unknown future. I try to inhabit it with my body and my voice, this place where times are linked before history unfolds, before life takes shape, develops its language, its art. For me it is the immaterial state that, like a pregnant woman, carries the question of causality, coincidence and fate.

With this piece I want to celebrate all women, all mothers, not just birth mothers, but also all those who lived, worked, created and passed on and then were erased from the narrative of history.