The title indicates a choreographic programme: ‘Towards the Species!’, that is, a movement back towards the primitive impulse of dance, observing and reshaping the rhythm that appears in animal, vegetal and mineral nature, and in human industry. We thus go back to the origins of human dance to relive the impetus that drives us to give a new form to time and free it from the constraints of chronology. The guiding idea behind Towards the Species points in two directions. It looks towards poetry, the first art to share with dance and music the need to go against time and its fatality, by drawing on the metrics of archaic Greek poetry and adopting some of its feet (iamb, spondee, dactyl, peon, epitrite). But it also looks towards animals, for an automatic rhythm of locomotion, which also raises the question of grace, and takes the movement of horses as its model.

In both cases, this dance only reveals the individual presence of each performer through a collective movement. The music, composed and developed together with the movement of the dance, step by step, is its propulsive origin. The performers’ level of intensity should remain intact throughout the entire duration of the dance, which involves the actual occurrence of movement, and not only its form.

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