In this solo Every-body-knows-what-tomorrow-brings-and-we-all-know-what-happened-yesterday, you explore questions of transmission and heritage. Can you tell us about the genesis of this project?
The title plays on a dual meaning: Everybody, meaning every single person, and every body, each individual body. There’s a tension between the individual and the collective, between the bodies dancing today and those that came before them. What interests me most is this temporal depth. The Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who was at the Festival d’Avignon in 2023, wrote: “The past doesn’t just tell us what happened yesterday, it also sheds light on what is happening today.” History is embedded is us, in our gestures, our postures, our memories. Our bodies are archives. The inherited things they carry can be visible or invisible, transmissions that are sometimes legitimised, sometimes marginalised. These are questions I particularly felt when I was a dance student. In many classes, students were asked to “leave their personal baggage behind.” Institutional learning tends to smooth out these traces, to take away our stories. But we can’t truly ignore what shapes us. All the more so when, outside, we have to face violence and injustice. It’s only later, after becoming professionals, that we are asked to reveal what makes us unique. That’s the paradox I wanted to explore. Because I have experienced those contradictory demands in my life and in my very body. The result is a choreography that questions history, but also the history of dance. I see this show as an awakening to our responsibility, both as citizens and as dancers. It’s about digging, connecting, weaving links between stories and cultures, between hip hop and postmodern dance. It’s about giving bodily memory a place again, affirming that our personal trajectories don’t disappear: they can be danced, passed on, and illuminate a collective horizon.
How does dance enable this awareness?
Bodies are often silent witnesses to power relationships, to forms of domination inscribed in history. To dance is to understand and express these dynamics through movement, to name what sometimes remains unspeakable. Dance opens up the world, revealing, questioning, and exposing the hierarchies that still exist. But we are far from a universal gesture, because the history of bodies is marked by fractures—those of slavery, colonisation, and the systems that have shaped the way we move and exist in space. While dance can reproduce these hierarchies, it can also create encounters and invite us to explore differences and travel through multiple spaces and identities. For me, to dance is to accept this responsibility: to question, to connect, to never forget that every movement carries a memory. That’s why I draw inspiration from hip hop and breakdance, to question the way these dances are often reduced to their spectacular dimension, cut off from their history and their social and political weight. Breakdance, for instance, is too often seen as merely an acrobatic display, when it carries within itself a statement, a form of resistance.
The history of hip hop is also part of a broader dialogue with other artistic movements that, as early as the 1960s and 70s, questioned the idea of institutional virtuosity. Artists like Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, or Yvonne Rainer, with her manifesto on non-virtuosity, sought to oppose the institutionalised bodies of ballet, to democratise dance. Because academic virtuosity has long marginalised working-class bodies, popular bodies, limiting spaces of representation. The hip hop movement claims a space of its own, where virtuosity becomes a tool of resistance, a way to make the invisible visible. Dance here isn’t just an aesthetic language, but a means to question history and mechanisms of domination, to give the body its political and social power back.
You have danced as part of a troupe or, more recently, with your mother in The Power (of) the Fragile. What does it mean to you to be alone on stage in Avignon?
Even in a solo, a dancer never truly dances alone. On stage, I am in dialogue with the people I’ve met, the books I’ve read, and the borders I’ve crossed. It is both a journey and a transformation, because one moves through spaces and beings at the same time as one is moved by them.
It’s also the first time you are dancing not to your own texts, but to someone else’s words…
In my previous projects like The Power (of) the Fragile or my solo inspired by In the Name of Identity by Amin Maalouf, the text came from me. This time, I invited Tunisian artist and activist Essia Jaïbi to write. We are from the same generation, we share the same questions, and her work adds an essential narrative dimension to mine. It embeds words within movement, enriching the abstraction of gesture. Her perspective doesn’t just accompany the dance, it transforms and reinvents it. I love that tension between words and the body. It’s an immensely rich dialogue.
Can you tell us about the music that accompanies this solo?
I love the idea of sampling in hip hop culture, this way of assembling fragments and recomposing sounds to create something new. It’s a form of resistance against the music industry, but also an approach close to archaeology: it’s about digging, unearthing traces, and bringing forgotten songs and stories back to life. This approach resonates deeply with my vision of dance. To dance is also to explore living archives, to dig into the gestures of the past in order to reactivate something both unprecedented and already familiar.
Interview conducted by Julie Ruocco in January 2025.