Beyond human: Montpellier Danse festival delivers one feat after another
This year’s celebration of contemporary dance in the French city is bold, baffling and breathtaking, with some high-voltage performers
Launched in 1981, the pioneering Montpellier Danse festival changed the face of contemporary dance, in France and beyond. In 2024, its own face changed when long-term figurehead Jean-Paul Montanari was succeeded by a four-person directorship of Hofesh Shechter, Jann Gallois, Dominique Hervieu and Pierre Martinez – though the programme currently continues its ethos of spreading dance across the city, and mixing the recherché with the popular.
Gallois’ Imminentes aims squarely at a general audience: an hour-long dynamo for six women that is never abstruse and always striking – if not always subtle. Its signature device, the long build-up, comes in from the start: the women lean in to each other in tender pairs, then gradually meld together into a dynamic and increasingly mobile group, bonded by linked arms and synced energies. Backing them is a crescendo of sound, and a bank of lights that ends up glowing as if powered by the sheer voltage that the dancers generate.
Some scenes shift the tone: convulsive, isolated solos caged within a cone of light; an almost machine-like sequence of whipped arms and pumped torsos; a lineup in which the women’s gestures suggest cleansing, even purging themselves. But the overall feel is of fierce women working vibrantly together and burning through their own energy; and if it sometimes gets a bit blockbuster – more stimulant than substance – it also gets its audience.
Landing in a sweeter spot, and a deeper one, is Le Pas du Monde by Collectif XY, a large-scale circus company which had already reached a vast audience via the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics. The performance is spectacular – human towers, vertiginous dives, headlong tumbles, breathtaking aerial flips and catches – but never just spectacle.
The spires of bodies built in the opening section are impressive achievements, and also evoke a sense of people collectively reaching for the sky – and of the ephemerality, even futility of such earthbound aspirations as the constructions are undone or, more dramatically, topple and collapse. Another scene, where performers each carry another person high upon their shoulders while others lie on the floor, is not only physical but also metaphorical: we support some people while stepping over others.
The imagery of Le Pas du Monde goes far beyond the human, though: there are surreally segmented creatures with bizarre protuberances, a scene which looks like a forest on the move, actions and configurations that feel windblown or sea-tossed. Well before the end, the piece has already become a kind of concrete physical poetry that reaches past the mind to touch both body and spirit.
Every contemporary dance season has works that baffle you – or is it just me? – and Montpellier is no exception. Among those, it’s nevertheless worth mentioning Tempest by Belgians Lisbeth Gruwez (dance) and Maarten Van Cauwenberghe (music) which begin that way, Gruwez slicing and chopping her way around a glacial stage like a battery-powered toy, to persistent drumbeats – but ends with a stunning set-piece of flashlights, rotating shadows and saturated sounds to which you cannot but surrender, even if you remain none the wiser.
Altogether more human, in aim, scale and story, is Twama Paradise by Tunisian-born, French-raised Héla Fattoumi, a duet – sometimes almost even a doubled solo – with Tunisian actor-dancer Sondos Belhassen. Recalling scenes and memories from their separate but parallel lives, it sets the two ageing women variously as twins, accomplices, rivals, ghosts or reflections. Melding Arabic chant and French chanson, undulating curves with balletic lines, it avoids simplistic cultural references to build a more nuanced portrait of lives twined through popular music, design and decoration, the experiences of womanhood, of ambition, and of ageing. A mature work, on many levels.
Montpellier Danse festival runs until 4 July. Sanjoy Roy’s trip was provided by the festival.