The work was first performed in 2002 at the Biennale de la Danse – an event that focused on Latin America. In 2016, it was reworked for the Paris Opera Ballet under Benjamin Millepied’s direction.

Latin American countries have been ravaged for centuries, and are inhabited by peoples whose cultural and human richness, their music, poets, songs, landscapes, warmth and persistence, are an example of resilience for us all.

We are reviving the work in 2025 because crimes currently being committed worldwide and continued repression compel us to drive the message home: exploring – through spatial and bodily possibilities – the intrigue and power games governing how societies are run by oligarchies and bolstered by international institutions that inform public economic policy-making through structural adjustments, required for their own gain. We are seizing hold of this prefiguration to reiterate that, by incessantly exploiting subterranean wealth, enslaving the peoples who inhabit these lands, implementing policies that have and continue to maintain strict control over their emancipation by cracking down on freedom of movement, bodies have become engaged in activism, complicity and indifference; and for as long as these tragedies continue to occur, they are our business too. They have a name.

Eight dancers – eight human beings – play with tension to attempt to derive from it what contributes – from complexity to indifference – to making us believe that this is the fate of the world, a world in which a few individuals’ success comes at the cost of several billion others’ ‘helplessness’, and that in fact, in spite of the brownie-points international finance hands out to star pupils – exhausting activism and destroying communities – one can’t eat applause.

Maguy Marin

CREDITS