In 2026, Festival Montpellier Danse’s new team of artistic directors stepped forward to look back on the past. Jann Gallois, Dominique Hervieu, Pierre Martinez and Hofesh Shechter chose to kick off their first collaborative programme with Histoires des danses [Histories of dances], a show gathering iconic works that have moulded this major French dance festival over four decades. As I took part in the latter days of this year’s edition, the notion of history seemed to intertwine with that of story. Among the seven performances I attended, three seemed to convey a reflection on the choreographer’s own artistic experience. From mise en abyme to autobiography, the ways in which the artists chose to stage their creative process prompted me to delve further into the issue of self-representation and storytelling.
Retrospection doesn’t necessarily mean introspection. To reflect on her career as choreographer and now co-director of National Choreographic Centre of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté in Belfort, Héla Fattoumi did not make a solo but rather a duet. In Twama Paradise, she shares the stage with actress, dancer and choreographer Sondos Belhassen, who becomes her fictional twin (twama in Arabic). Together, they mirror each other’s experiences, memories and fantasies, exploring the echoes and uniqueness of their life stories. The dreamed twinship allows them to call in multiple shared references that have shaped their artistic identities, such as Tunisian traditional clothes or Jacques Demy’s film Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967). This mirror effect presents a double simultaneous interest: as Fattoumi seeks to step outside of herself to get a better look at her work, she confronts herself with the look of an alter ego (and vice versa). This reciprocal structure leads the two performers to make inside jokes and winks that the audience doesn’t always get (and maybe isn’t supposed to) – but it does tend to deepen the gap between the stage and the audience, who may lose grip on the performance.
Bazm (repertoire) by Berlin-based Iranian choreographer Armin Hokmi produces a similar effect, yet with different premises. The performance is based on the confrontation of two opposite notions summed up in the title: on the one hand, bazm is a Persian word referring to a spontaneous gathering; on the other hand, a repertoire indicates official memory and established dance practices. By reuniting these contradictory concepts, Hokmi intends to explore forms of movement that have been marginalised and disregarded through history. No archives onstage: the eleven performers develop basic sequences of minimalistic gestures to create a pseudo-repertoire. Hokmi intentionally works with limited and repetitive vocabulary to examine it with extreme precision. Indeed, looking back at the two previous performances he has presented at Montpellier Danse in three years as an associate artist to Agora – Cité internationale de la danse (Shiraz and Of the Heart – An Étude), this method could be considered his operational mode. Thus, Bazm (repertoire) holds a double fundamental contradiction: supposedly forgotten movements are still performed; and by repeating the same choreographic patterns from one piece to another, Hokmi sticks to his own policy instead of making room for spontaneity. The intention is witty but tricky. As if stuck with the key elements of his own creative story, Hokmi stays in his comfort zone and doesn’t give enough overview of his work. Repetition thus turns into retread.
Between connivance and redundance, how do we break the deadlock? If Olga de Soto is to be believed, taking a step back to look at history can help reread your own story. In Une introduction (revisitée), the Spanish choreographer and researcher based in Brussels presents her decade-long investigation into Kurt Jooss’s satirical anti-military ballet La Table Verte (1932). This project follows the line she has been tracing since 1992 on corporeal memory and transmission of dance. Yet her work here does not bring dancers onstage but rather archives on screen. Taking the form of a conference, the piece exposes not only her research centre of interest, but also her staging methodology. That doesn’t mean that she draws a strict line between her choreographer’s and researcher’s perspectives: on the contrary, the way she analyses different materials to reconstruct the story of La Table Verte is deeply rooted in her choreographer’s point of view. Each piece of evidence, each hypothesis and unanswered question reflects her approach to dance practice, especially in the way she engages with the audience. By showing pictures and interviews of former dancers, as well as video recordings of Jooss’s ballet, she allows the public to connect with the story of the piece and its impact through time. The historical context and anecdotes even deepen the kinaesthetic experience. The motion and emotions described by former dancers as they remember how they performed La Table Verte resonate in the contemporary spectators’ experiences of watching the archives.
Does it mean that choreographers should stop choreographing to reflect on their own work? Not quite, of course. Introspection and self-analysis are fertile in a creative process. But when it comes to turning deep personal thoughts into an open show, reflection needs to be linked to reception. Une introduction (revisitée) underlines how self-representation and storytelling in dance are fundamentally collective experiences. Beyond exposure, the choreographies that bond with the audience remain the most striking ones. By dancing their story, they make history. ●
Callysta Croizer’s trip to Montpellier was supported by Agora, Cité Internationale de la Danse
