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Interview

with Kókó Jaspar, comments collected by Etienne Buraud

At the Origin, Dance
1987-1990

Encounter with Kokò Jaspar

During the move from the Bastille studio, we came across a collection of drawing rolls carefully preserved, taped in groups of ten to fifteen. Some were numbered and dated, others cataloged. Some bore no other indication than a single number, marking a series. There are about eight hundred of them in four different formats: 17.1x21.1 cm, 17.7x25.3 cm, 29.7x42 cm, and 30x40 cm, drawn in 1987 and 1988 on plain paper, using pencil. The paper of the smaller formats has yellowed with age. They represent dance drawings made during Kokò Jaspar's classes, a stage director and choreographer.

How did your encounter with Roland Buraud happen?

He came once a week for three years, producing at least fifteen drawings per session. It was a mutual friend, Françoise Rochelet, who introduced him, following an emotional disappointment. At first, I refused. She insisted, and he came. It was at the Ménagerie de Verre. He removed his hat, sat on the floor against the piano, and began sketching.

At the end of each session, we would go to a café. There, he would show us his sketches. The first time, we were all completely stunned by how he immediately captured what was happening in the class—it wasn’t an ordinary dance class. What I appreciated about him was how he did his thing without ever being intrusive. There was an air of very elegant discretion about him—present, yet somehow apart. He captured both the dance and the life of the class. He took everything in for himself, and yet, there was this restitution of what he had done. He gave us something to see. Because of this restitution, we accepted him on the same level as those who danced. He participated in his own way. He was truly with us.

What brought you two so close artistically?

It was the meeting of two individuals. For him, it was painting; for me, it was dance; but we connected over something else. It wasn’t the form that interested him so much as what was happening within the energy. He captured the graphic essence, the line—that is, the direction and motivation of the movement, the flow, what happens internally within the motion.

What brought us together was this—the interior, the part that radiates and spirals. You could see how he sought the inner power of movement. What brought us together was the writing in space. You could see an external trace, propelled by a form of breath originating from within, encompassing everything happening inside and emerging externally. At first, he thought he wasn’t doing it well. Then, an alchemy occurred.

What fascinated me was how someone from a different discipline had grasped something much deeper than just the form, the dance as I understand it. And what was interesting was that he was trying, and everyone in the class was trying, too. We were all searching—him, the students, and myself, each in our own domain. The process was more important than the result.

What, in your opinion, gives these drawings their strength, beyond the fact that they contain the seeds of his future creations?

For me, styles are irrelevant—it’s what lies hidden within the style that interests me. And he understood that, seeking to represent and trace the essence of movement. He had grasped my pursuit of the "ground zero" of movement. Who are you, and what do you do with that? What do you have to offer? A choreographer poses the question of drawing in space. What interests me is the line in space, where the dancer disappears. If the dancer does not disappear, it is not dance.

He used to challenge us to identify anyone in his drawings. Occasionally, you could guess, but it was rare. The dancer is the one who makes space vibrate. In Roland’s drawings, the dancer disappears. What remains is movement and what drives it—a thought, an intelligence. It is not drawing for drawing's sake or dance for dance’s sake.

These drawings think and move at the same time, with a dynamic that is extremely coherent—there is never anything random. I think he also captured, for himself, the connections that made sense among people, between people. How dancers interpreted, searched, destabilized, and started over, without ever being certain they had found anything.

And in his representation of the body in motion?

He completely understood that everything is spiral-shaped. You see spirals in the sketches he made during the classes. The spiral is the heart of movement—it contains its power. Something straight has no power. He understood that. A body is a democracy, really.

In the drawings, you can see how he captured weight transfers, all the information that spirals and flows from one muscle to another. The focus on precision is to avoid breaking anything. If you know exactly what you’re doing, you can do whatever you want. If you don’t, you break yourself. That’s an art. In class, the idea was to explore and understand how things worked—it’s the technical side, akin to understanding perspective for a painter. Once you know that, once you’ve internalized the sensations, you can begin to externalize, discover what you want to express. Otherwise, it’s just gibberish. He knew that because he was an artist.

What always strikes me when I look at the drawings is the connection between the graphic nature of the line and the weight, the power of the hips, the spine, the feet—the turning points of the spirals that create momentum.

In some drawings, there are arrows. What do they represent?

He listened to what I said and observed the reaction it provoked. Some arrows represented what he wanted to retain—directions, interpretations. Others were things personal to him that I have no idea about. And there was humor in some of them, based on things I’d said but didn’t remember.

Often, things emerge in the heat of the moment that we don’t even notice. He noted the funniest ones. In one drawing, the arrows became African spears, and the dance class a cannibalistic ceremony—it’s very funny. He was also fascinated by feet. He often told me I had "African feet." Look, he wrote: "You must have a spiritual foot."

How did this cycle conclude?

He held an exhibition in 1989 for Génie de la Bastille. The theme was: "Which artist inspired you?" He chose me. I was very honored. He made this famous exhibition where he built walls with all the pages from his drawing notebooks. He had turned them into scrolls descending from the ceiling to the floor.

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©2025 by Etienne Buraud

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