Perhaps best known through performing at in the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics, Collectif XY is a large-scale circus company with an appeal that is both popular and poetic. As with other shows, Le Pas du Monde 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 protruberances, 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. ●
Sanjoy Roy’s trip to Montpellier was supported by Agora, Cité Internationale de la Danse
