“During a residency in 2024 in Poland, I intuitively started gathering information on the musical traditions of the country. I listened to polonaises, polkas, and mostly mazurkas. The rhythm and expressiveness of these melodies seemed familiar and seductive. As I listened and researched further, I realized that I’d been dancing to mazurkas since I was 6 years old, when I first got into the Conservatory. As I looked through the music collections for dance classes, I found all the piano recordings I’d learned how to do ballet steps to – grand battements, pirouettes, jumps… These are all mazurkas, with their characteristic accentuation and irresistible lyricism.
I also remembered the mazurkas choreographed by Isadora Duncan, which I still dance today. This pioneer of modern dance used Chopin’s mazurkas to make them the soundtrack of a solo dance, undulating and free, liberated from the shackles of ballet. I realized that mazurkas had been a part of my life as a dancer since I was a child – a discreet matrix to my body’s disciplined training and to my discovery of the history of modern dance.
I therefore wondered: how could a dance that first appeared in Masuria at the end of the 18th century, a dance of labor and popular celebrations, become indissociably connected to the construction of my body as a dancer? Or to put it differently, how can a country dance that has evolved into a highbrow one continue to influence our bodies? What paths does the mazurka trace and preserve? What modern history does it bear witness to?
Exploring the threads of the mazurka thus became a form of manifesto: I see the mazurka as a canvas that, for over two centuries, has allowed communities and individuals to give shape to their anxieties, joys, urgent concerns, and desires. Its ability to transcend social classes, borders, and the functions of art resonates with my own desire to move between multiple sources and lineages of dance.
Little by little, another image emerged: that of a group of exaggerated, over-the-top figures, heavily made-up and nonchalant, swept up in the mazurkas – the “démentes” (“the crazy ones”). The word surfaced like a memory: the “démentes” is what the Parisian drag queens of the ’90s called themselves, before the term “drag queen” became widespread. The “démentes” are my elders, the ones who paved the way for our bodies to overflow, to stylize themselves, to move. The “démentes” are not characters, but states of the body, ways of being carried away, displaced, overwhelmed by dance.”
François Chaignaud, May 2026