MOTEUR2025

In this solo, the dancer, balancing on one foot, initiates a step that he never takes. In the meantime, he probes, he approaches, he almost completes the form that this step might take.

A step is analysed here through the very lens of the prohibition against taking it. Under the effect of this constraint, the movements of the locomotor system are freed from their original function. From the act of moving from one place to another — which is locomotion — only the movement itself remains.

In MOTEUR, Cassiel Gaube revisits the multiple techniques that have nourished and shaped his understanding of dance: ballet, a major nexus in the history of Western dance — which Steve Paxton characterises by a desire to extend the limbs into space away from the body’s centre —, post-modern and contemporary techniques, as well as house dance and the rhizome of social dances in which it is embedded; with the aim of bringing to light what each of them reveals about the spectrum of kinaesthetic possibilities of the human body and of exploring their potential intersections.

Each technical tradition is taken as a singular prism through which to apprehend the possibilities of the dancing body. The work seeks less to synthesise these approaches than to identify their underlying logics and to discover what emerges at their intersections — where the saliences of one reveal the interstices of another, and where the contact of their differences opens up new kinaesthetic spaces yet to be imagined.