Nathalie Richard

Brazilian choreographer Lia Rodrigues returns with Borda, a new piece that marks and celebrates the 35th anniversary of the Lia Rodrigues Companhia de Danças, a company that set up its home in the Maré favela in Rio de Janeiro in 2004. 

Choreographer Dorothée Munyaneza’s piece Version(s) draws up an encounter between men, in which the poet and boxer Christian Nka, accompanied by musician Ben LaMar Gay looks into his career and ambivalent relationship with violence. Combining dance, text and live music, she puts together a hybrid space, which is both portrait and celebration.

Faustin Linyekula, a central figure on the Congolese artistic scene joins forces with composer and filmmaker Franck Moka in order to continue artistic creation in a country in the grip of chaos. Drawing upon live music and cinema, Profanations is an urgent show. It pits poetry against destruction, and life-giving energy against the powers of death. 

Alone on stage, Maria Hassabi stands very close to its edge, in a theatre space that condenses the audience’s attention on bodies. With a slowness verging on immobility, the artist embodies a succession of images, ranging from the iconic to those of a more diffuse kind. In doing so, she presents herself in full view, in all her strength and vulnerability.

Mirlitons is an encounter between two voices and two bodies, those of choreographer François Chaignaud and beatboxer Aymeric Hainaux. It gives rise to a physical and musical alchemy in which sound, voice and rhythm combine to form an unclassifiable performative intensity. 

After immersing herself in the forests with Αγρίμι (Fauve), choreographer Lenio Kaklea now lifts her eyes towards the sky, thereby continuing the ecological focus that has characterised her writing since 2022. But Les oiseaux (The Birds) does not idealize these air-born beings in any way. Instead, the septet accompanied by a non-living bird inivtes us to cast our eyes beyond our overly human gaze.

The brief, infinitive the title of this latest piece by Rachid Ouramdane, co-director of the Centre choréographique national de Grenoble, gives us an idea of the project’s guiding sense of purity and sparseness. We are presented with a white stage set, cast shadows, and two dancers, Lora Juodkaite and Annie Hanauer. On it, the two dancers create a torsion which is as physical as it is perceptive of their image - simultaneously offsetting the course of the movement and the way it is seen.