Sur le Pont d'Avignon

Pont d'Avignon at dusk

"Sur le Pont d'Avignon" (pronounced [syʁ lə pɔ̃ daviɲɔ̃]) ("On the Bridge of Avignon") is a French song about a dance performed on the Pont d'Avignon (officially Pont Saint-Bénézet) that dates back to the 15th century. The dance actually took place under the bridge and not on the bridge (sous le Pont d'Avignon, not sur).

Dance description

1. The dance starts out with everyone in pairs, dancing around each other.
2. When the chorus is done dancers must stop in front of their partners, and traditionally the male will bow on the first part then tip his hat on the second.
3. When the chorus begins again the dancers repeat step one.
4. When this stops, so does the dance. The girl curtsies to one side, then the other.
5. For the first part, dancers repeat step one, and if they have an audience, turn on their heels and bow to them.

Lyrics

Chorus

The Pont d'Avignon and its song

Sur le Pont d'Avignon
L'on y danse, l'on y danse
Sur le Pont d'Avignon
L'on y danse tous en rond.

On the bridge in Avignon
They are dancing there, They are dancing there

On the bridge in Avignon
They all dance in circles there

First verse

Les beaux messieurs font comme ça
Et puis encore comme ça.

The fine gentlemen go like this (bow)
And then again like this.

Second verse

Les belles dames font comme ça
Et puis encore comme ça.

The beautiful ladies go like this (curtsy)
And then again like that.

Third verse

Les filles font comme ça
Et puis encore comme ça.

The young girls go like this (salute)
And then like that.

Fourth verse

Les musiciens font comme ça
Et puis encore comme ça.

The musicians go like this (they all bow to women)
And then like that.

Variation

American music publisher Cherry Lane Music Company has printed a different verse (1993):

Les jeunes filles font comme ça
Les jeunes gens font comme ça

The young girls go like this,
The young people go like this.

In popular culture

In 1951, the National Film Board of Canada produced the 5-minute animated film Sur le Pont d'Avignon, in which extravagantly dressed marionettes pantomime the song.

The French fantasy comic book Hypocrite: comment decoder l'etircopyh by Jean-Claude Forest (pub. Dargaud 1973) centres around the destruction of the Pont de Avignon, here imagined as a giant petrified sabre-toothed tiger spanning the river. During the scenes set on the bridge itself, the characters sing this song, led by the ghostly Scottish piper Major Grumble.

In the 1978 American miniseries Holocaust, some of the children in the Warsaw Ghetto sing the song in class with Berta Weiss.

In 1990, The Simpsons' episode The Crepes of Wrath (season 1), Bart Simpson sings the song on the way to his accommodation during his student exchange program.

The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Chain of Command" (1992) uses this song as a means for Captain Picard, an appreciator of philosophy and poetry born in France, to resist the effects of torture.

In 1992, a cartoon titledThe Real Story of..... Sur le Pont d'Avignon was produced by CINAR and France Animation, featuring the song and a ghost story revolving around a clockmaker and an enchanted organ.

In the German-dubbed version of The Lion King (1994), Zazu sings the song to Scar after being forced by latter to sing something more cheerful than "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen", and instead of singing "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts".

The song was played throughout the episode of Bluey called Library.

External links

• Media related to Sur le pont d'Avignon at Wikimedia Commons