What can dance do? It’s hard to say. But as, even in his precociously Victorian stiffness, Mr. Darcy knew dancing or dance performance is a universal art. As far as I know or Darcy knew, it may be the only one. Every brute dances, no need of the higher physics for it.
In that most famous book on looking for love, Darcy also learns that he has to learn people before he may love a person. A body has to learn dance, too, to appreciate dancing: exercise patience, take risks.
Indeed, I’ve taken an interest in dance over the years because it helps me understand people. So I think of the June Events dance festival, which opens this coming Monday, 2 June, as a sort of summer trimester in my annual continuing education program. This year, themes include “diversity, inclusion and living with the natural world (rapport au vivant)”.
As a culture professional, Anne Sauvage, director of the Atelier and responsible for the June Events program, told me she makes her choices within a framework of public entertainment, addressing public concerns and enabling access to culture for creators, learners and spectators alike. Especially, she says, she looks for “singularity”, specialness, not necessarily originality, asking herself what’s new and emerging in performance themes, as well as in dance esthetics. She cites Linda Hayford’s Processing #10 and Candice Martel’s Electrotap, musique à regarder vs. danse à écouter(“Music to watch vs. dance to listen to”) – without neglecting the long-term development of such performance artists, choreographers and creators as Marie Caroline Hominal, working out of Switzerland, and a consistently appreciated figure on the Paris dance performance scene.
Linda Hayford’s Processing #10, both a dance style (“Shifting Pop”) and a thematic framework (around identity) and clearly inspired by hip hop and the club scene, opens the festival. Hayford will be working a duo with the innovative artist Rebecca Journo, an innovative performance choreographer (see: How is Rebecca Journo’s “Portrait” like the proverbial hedgehog? It does tricks that count) and an Atelier associate for 2025 and 2026.
Hayford’s “Shifting Pop” style uses a radicalized break-dance movement called “popping” – sudden contractions and releases of muscles – in a “battle” format (short, intense show performances that permit an audience to compare and appreciate a performer’s work). Performers “process” through different club dance styles, including funk, hype, locking or new style, self-exploring and enabling spectators to explore body movement.
Hayford’s aim, if I understand it, is to enable spectators to descry the underlying “fluidness” – a sort of wave entanglement or phlogiston – that informs what we think of as dance. The “processing/fluidness” idea also frames the artist’s meditation on identity.
Hayford’s Processing # 10 is accompanied the same evening by Marie Caroline Hominal’s Numéro 0 / scène III, her first multi-performer piece – 10 dancers, three musicians. It seems to me that there’s always something of lurking irony and cognitive dissonance in Hominal’s work. When I saw her for the first time more than 10 years ago, she was solo and working on un-movement (I think I wrote light-heartedly about her performance as a sort of a case study for anti-elite culture warriors), so Numéro 0 will be for me and for many other spectators a whole new experience of her always well-thought through work.
Hayford on Hominal will make for a diverse singular evening.
Candice Martel’s Electrotap, a solo of “dance and body percussion”, i.e., tap dance 2025-style, on 12 June at Carreau du Temple, will mark the festival’s mid-point. Martel, who describes herself as a hybrid artist, notes that tap dance involves at least 300 hundred years of cultural braiding. In that spirit, by twisting around and under layers of electronica, splashing with dub and hurrying along with groove, her choreography is made to remind spectators that tap dance is dance and drumming, glide and percussion, rhythm as well as beat. She’s using work by Mikaël Charry of the Anakronic Electro Orkestra, leader of the (surely exploding) electro- klezmer scene, and the guitar of composer and producer Thomas Naïm to put pulsing muscle and blood into her Electrotap performance.
Workshops on tap dance led by the artist as well as public discussion complement the performances.
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Other artists featured at June Events 2025
Click on the name to find out more about their June Events performance. Habib Ben Tanfous, Julie Botet, Jeanne Brouaye, Puma Camillê, Gilles Clément et Christian Ubl, Victoria Côté Péléja, Rosalind Crisp, Florencia Demestri et Samuel Lefeuvre, Simon Feltz, Geisha Fontaine et Pierre Cottreau, Cassiel Gaube, Yan Giraldou et Amélie Malleroni, Rémy Héritier, Mohamed Issaoui, Wanjiru Kamuyu, Daniel Larrieu, Joanne Leighton, Ikue Nakagawa, Alban Ovanessian, Dilo Paulo, Pierre Pontvianne, Manuel Roque, Nina Santes, Liz Santoro, Pierre Godard, Jéssica Teixeira, Vânia Vaneau, Louise Vanneste
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