A SENSE OF CONNECTION
Marseille, May 2024
Since the success of their first show Room With A View with the Ballet National de Marseille, the collective (LA)HORDE has continued to extend the expressiveness of dance beyond its traditional boundaries. Most recently, the dancers of the ballet performed on the streets of Marseille for the teaser of Chanel's Cruise 2024/25 fashion show, along with dancer and muse of the house Marion Barbeau. Directed by French director Ladj Ly, this moving journey across the Mediterranean territory ends on the roof of La Cité Radieuse, where the show took place in early May. Shortly after, we had the chance to chat with Marine Brutti, Arthur Harel and Jonathan Debrouwer, the three members of (LA)HORDE, about their first collaboration with Chanel and, more generally, the necessity and essentialism of dance today.
Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer and Arthur Harel at Chanel Cruise 2024/25, La Cité Radieuse
It’s your first collaboration with Chanel. How did it come about?
Arthur Harel: Chanel works with director Ladj Ly, who came to us with the idea of working together. It was a very fluid collaboration and a pleasure to work together. We integrated the dancers of Ballet National de Marseille and used some parts of the choreography from the first piece we did with the ballet in 2019, Room With A View.
How did you go about creating this teaser and selecting the various passages from the piece?
Jonathan Debrouwer: Ladj saw the piece and identified the parts that interested him. We visited the different places in Marseille he wanted to film in and chose the moments that would work well in each space, considering the fact that the finale scene had to be the apotheosis of this collective energy. The chronological story is that Marion Barbeau arrives by boat to progressively reach the Cité Radieuse, surrounded by a circle of dancers. The narration perfectly worked with some specific passages of Room With A View.
Marine Brutti: It was the first time we also worked with Marion Barbeau. She is an amazing artist, dancer and actress. This project was a beautiful encounter between Marion, who comes from L’Opéra de Paris, and the Ballet National de Marseille. All the dancers hit it off immediately.
The collaboration reflects the link you build between various fields. What is the specificity of establishing a link with a house like Chanel?
AH: I believe this link comes naturally from a common desire for adventure. Chanel's approach to occupying territory and investing in all the talents of a city is something that excited and touched us a lot. By coming here to do this show, the house met all the actors in the city, from the underground to the institution level. Revisiting Room With A View for Chanel is quite moving for us because it's a great collective work that represents a certain energy of the city. It's a race to the front, a youthfulness that this city represents.
In parallel with this project, your new show Edge Of Content is currently on tour. Are you working on any other projects?
JD: Yes, we are currently working with the stage director Ivo van Hove for a piece about PJ Harvey, who will be interpreted by Sandra Hüller.
Amazing! How did you end up working with van Hoven for this new piece?
MB: He saw our shows and contacted us because he wanted to create a kind of musical piece retracing the life of PJ Harvey, not entirely in a biographical way. He asked us to work with him on the choreography and movement of the actors and dancers on stage. I think it's going to be a hybrid project, mixing dance, staging, theatrical sets, music, live performances and so on. There will be 10 dancers on stage and Sandra Hüller as the main character, but there will be no text, except through singing. It's a fairly ambitious project that we'll be showing in August at the Ruhr Triennale in Germany.
I can’t wait to see that. Once again, it’s another way of bringing together the different forms of the performing arts and deploying them. To finish, I'd like to ask each of you, why dance? What is its symbolism and importance?
JD: Dance is essential. People need to express themselves, to exorcize everyday life. Dance has never been as powerful as it is today. It also goes with the fact that, with cell phones, people easily put themselves on stage. There's a democratization of being in oneself and not being afraid to be an actor. This has created a very beautiful impulse where emotion and protest have never been so powerful on the networks and visible to everyone. Dance is a universal language that remains very sensitive, very fragile too, but so powerful that it echoes around the world and through different mediums.
MB: I think we can add to that the fact that it's a fairly plural form. There are many ways of making dance, of representing and feeling dance. We focus mainly on dance that is symbolic and very sentimental. We have emotions that run through us as artists that we try to question through the body of the ballet, through the dancers who are our collaborators, to write stories together and reflect the world through our bodies. Dance is essential indeed, especially if we consider the fact that we're separating our minds from our bodies so much these days. We're very good at projecting ourselves into alternative worlds, which isn't a problem in itself, but the connection of our soul and intellect to our bodies is very important to bring back this connection between humans. We live in a world that is all about communication, but has trouble with connecting. Dance remains one of the mediums that connects very strongly with its audience, whether online or live.
AH: Also, there are 16 different nationalities at the ballet. Whether in our latest creation Edge Of Content or Room With A View, this ephemeral international community decides to unite in silence to explore a multitude of possibilities for self-expression, in the middle of a world of constant noise and hubbub. At the ballet, we find a safe space to confront each other, to exchange different points of view because we come from different backgrounds, countries and cultures. When it comes the time of performance and representation, everyone quietly gathers to share and perform for the audience. That's also why we chose dance, because it's a silent medium that says a lot, and it’s perhaps the most ambivalent place we can find today. We're in dire need of ambivalence and grey areas at the moment, to get away from a form of binarity and bring back nuances.
Interview and portrait by Hanna Pallot