Françoise Riopelle

Françoise Riopelle (born Françoise Lespérance; 1927) is a Canadian Québécoise dancer and choreographer from Montreal, Quebec. She is considered one of the pioneers of modern dance in Quebec.[1] Riopelle was also a dedicated activist, associated with the Automatistes, and was one of sixteen signatories to the Refus Global in 1948.[2]

Françoise Riopelle
Born
Françoise Lespérance

1927
Montreal, Quebec
NationalityCanadian
OccupationDancer, choreographer

Life and Work

Riopelle was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1927. In 1946, at the age of 20, she married the painter Jean-Paul Riopelle and moved with him to Paris.[3] While in Paris, Riopelle studied modern dance and choreography before returning to Montreal in 1958.[4]

Riopelle is credited, along with Françoise Sullivan and Jeanne Renaud, as being the pioneers of modern dance in Quebec[5].

In 1959, she founded the École moderne de danse de Montréal with Jeanne Renaud, the first school in Canada dedicated to contemporary dance. The two artists also founded the dance company Groupe de danse moderne de Montréal which performed from 1961-1965. The school participated in the first International Week of Today's Music/Semaine internationale de musique actuelle, a festival of contemporary music and dance that was held in Montreal in 1961.[3]

In 1978, she founded with Dena Davida the choreographer's collective "Qui danse?".[3]

Activism

Riopelle was one of two youngest signatories (with Thérèse Leduc) to the Refus Global, an anti-establishment manifesto published in 1948 by a group of Québécois artists and intellectuals closely associated with Les Automatistes.[6][2]

Personal Life

In 1946, she married the painter Jean-Paul Riopelle and moved with him to Paris. They had two daughters: Yseult-Mia in 1948 and Sylvie in 1949. The couple separated in 1953. She later married Pierre Mercure; the couple had a son.[1] Mercure died in 1966[7] and Renaud married Neil Chotem who died in 2008.[8]

gollark: It's entirely in person here and the government requires people to come.
gollark: Vaguely relatedly, I'm going back to school tomorrow, it seems.
gollark: They aren't even that cheap compared to used hardware.
gollark: I mean, any recent Intel/AMD CPU and tons of ARM SoCs have hardware video encoding.
gollark: You'd really think they'd hardware-accelerate that.

References
  1. "Fonds Françoise Riopelle" (in French). Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec.
  2. "The Automatists and the Book". Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 1949–1951.
  3. "Riopelle, Françoise". Regroupement québécois de la danse (in French). Retrieved 2020-05-09.
  4. "Advitam". Advitam (in French). Retrieved 2020-05-09.
  5. Picard, René (February 1974). "Esquisse d'une histoire de la danse moderne au Québec" (PDF). L'Interdit. Retrieved May 9, 2020.
  6. "Rebelle et libre". La Presse (in French). 2013-08-05. Retrieved 2020-05-09.
  7. "Mercure, Pierre". The Canadian Encyclopedia.
  8. "Neil Chotem Obituary". Montreal Gazette. February 23, 2008.
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