First Light

First Light explores the tension between the habits that carry us and the impulse to move otherwise through a live negotiation. The performers move together within a shared code, yet each gesture contains the opportunity to depart from it, to hesitate, to resist, to choose another direction. To step outside the pattern is to risk getting lost beyond it – usually in a solitary loss of balance that, now and then—instinct or chance?—manages to spread into a shared state.

On stage, this tension is difficult to resolve, echoing a broader condition in which structures persist even as they strain. Amid this instability, Goro’s work challenges fixed ideas of identity as cultural behaviour and prescribed roles by allowing norms to unravel. The tension finds its only temporary resolution in the moment of imbalance itself: when the body slips out of what it has learned to repeat, and another way of being might briefly appear.

In a charged collective environment, dancers move, observe and withdraw from the draining flow, only to re-enter it. Dance here resembles language. Encounter, interaction, communication all feel necessary and yet impossible, setting up for an ever-evolving negotiation. Who moves first beyond the given structure? Who risks stepping outside the shared code, knowing that very action may tilt the balance of the collective movement? The language stays sustained and beneath runs another score: the persistent question of whether to hold on or let go. 

Welcome to the threshold state. In the ongoing recalibration, a small, strange gesture briefly catches the light: the first sign that tiny cracks have begun to run through the pattern. They are just wide enough for the dancers to approach the threshold and test how far the body can move beyond the behaviours it has learned to repeat. Through encounter, movement stretches, expands, threatening to exceed itself. Movement becomes a way of letting oneself happen, beyond intention, beyond the need to define. This becomes a thing of speed, risk and control pushed to their limit—the drift, as in racing, is to remain in motion only by moving at the edge of losing balance. The real beginning of the performance lies in the first successful attempt to slip and the first loss of balance. A turning point in medias res, the instant in which the body moves otherwise, before it knows where that movement may lead. 

Welcome to the heightened state. The tempo has risen, tension tipped, the negotiation frayed. Cracks widened, and chaos spills into an order that can no longer contain what has been set in motion. What follows must continue under altered conditions: a different rhythm, a different logic, another body entirely. Gestures accelerate, overshoot their own intention, and the light now flickers fully across the possibility of another way altogether. The body finds itself elsewhere – exposed, exhilarated, in all its complexity and vulnerability. And once that elsewhere has been reached, there is no fully returning. What might emerge from what has just been broken open?

Moving through the thematic terrain of Bodies of Identity, Identities of Body, the diptych brings together collaborations by Ermira Goro and Smaïl Kanouté with En–Knap Group and centers around the idea – and practice – of dance as an attempt to deconstruct identity. Across two distinct works, identity does not appear as inheritance or a fixed position, but as something questioned through movement. Repeated, interrupted, changed. Rehearsed, as we speak.

While moving, while dancing, while “being in the body,” the distinction between me and you, between me and the world around me, may begin to blur—to the point that its validity, if not its very reality, comes into question. This enables us to explore what lies out there, beyond and before the principle of non-contradiction. ‘Beyond’ as a space of dance where distinctions become blurred, and where I can exist as several nuances at once, without the need for them to be coherent or consistent with one another. ‘Before’ as primordial, pre-linguistic, pre-rational: something that exists even before we begin to organize the world into categories and oppositions. 

Both works treat the body as a site of inscription – shaped by heritage and memory, animated by desire, and charged by collective energy, yet never fully contained by them. The body signifies identity while simultaneously exceeding it, falling short and overflowing at once. In this tension, movement becomes a means of imagining who we are, who we might become, and how we exist together – a question that unfolds not only on a broader social level, but also within this specific group of six dancers, a collective suspended between what has been and what is emerging. The dance diptych is, in fact, Mattia Cason’s first project in his role as the ensemble’s new artistic director.