In this era of closing borders and growing migration, my intention with Danse Mutante was to observe the voyage of ideas. It took two years to prepare this off-road project, organizing and grouping a multitude of people around the issues of permeability, solidarity, and the beautiful, cruel quest for oneness. We did not imagine in the planning stages just how deeply the mutations would upset
and “provoke” us. From the gestation of ideas to the erosion of power and authority and the total loss of reference points, the very concepts of transformation and evolution have permeated this series of works’ core themes. Each of the artists involved here offers a particular slice of the wide spectrum of possible mutations. They are conceptual, aesthetic, rarely choreographic but intensely personal. I had imagined a simple group project, but instead I have seen dialoguing intimacies answer each other, contradict each other, and even demolish the premise for our being together. The Darwinian conception of evolution contains more than a bit of the idea of “every man for himself”, and Danse Mutante is not exempt from that reality. However, it is also characterized by the immensely generous act of making an offering of one’s work. Of letting a public confession become the landscape, the hinterland of someone else. Marked by a certain kind of destiny, what you will witness is without a doubt a lengthy reflexive suite of works on creation and its corollary, destruction. It is also an observation on the social and political contexts surrounding the creation of these works. From my homebase of Montreal, passing through the hubbub of New York, all the way to the culture shock of Bamako and the orderliness of Rotterdam, in Danse Mutante the clichés through which the world views us are put under the spotlight and taken apart in one fell swoop.