Rewind

Rewind (2026) turns towards a temporal register, bringing the past into dialogue with the present, with the body positioned between them as a carrier of historical density. Through an imagined encounter with one's ancestors, each dancer navigates questions of otherness, continuity and transformation. Identity unfolds through relation, through approaching the figures that precede us and remain within us. 

The temporary organism moves through different stages of becoming, of past and future selves overlapping, of past, present, and future being accessed simultaneously, shifting between them as if different strata of experience were visible all at once. This opens a sense of reality that feels expanded or augmented. In contemporary language, “augmented reality” refers to a technological overlay, a digital layer added to the world through screens and devices. Rewind approaches augmentation as the body’s capacity for awareness of the relations inhabiting this lived reality beyond the seen. The question of reality, or identity, therefore expands beyond the boundary between one person and another (“where I end and you begin”), reaching through lineages, histories, and presences that continue to inhabit the body (“where I end and those who precede and exceed me begin”). Yet even this encounter requires a form of self-loss. For the dancers, Kanouté’s approach proposed a specific task: to remain fully themselves, without abandoning their performative skills, but inhabiting them within this expanded reality so completely that the boundaries of the self begin to dissolve into a wider sea of relations.

Before movement, before language, there is respiration: a simple physical action that draws attention inward. Breath is technique, the dancers begin by practicing it together. From breath emerges voice; murmuring thickens into chanting, and chanting into singing. Voices oscillate in a collective resonance. The vibration of this temporary organism becomes the underlying logic of the space. Each dancer introduces fragments drawn from their own physical history, imposing it on the others: habits of posture, personal research, recurring fascinations. One lowers the body close to the ground, exploring the connection between upright human locomotion and something more instinctive. Another pushes breathing into visible strain, where exhaustion alters the body’s organisation and new movement possibilities begin to surface. Exhaustion becomes a threshold between the body’s immanence and its transcendence. The dancers reach a point where movement can no longer rely solely on control: the body begins to reorganise itself, subconsciously releasing certain patterns while allowing others to appear. 

Dancers trace arcs through space, their trajectories folding back on themselves until the stage begins to resemble an orbiting system. Bodies turn around shared centres, light moves through space in slow cycles resembling successive sunrises. Gestures circulate between the six, returning transformed through another body, accumulating traces of previous attempts. Movement travels, disappears, reappears. What returns is never identical to what came before. The circular logic resonates with something deeply familiar to the body, as much of human movement already unfolds along curves and rotations: walking, turning, breathing, even the slow revolutions that carry us across the planet each day without our noticing. Kanouté does not present these motions only as symbols of the cosmos; rather, the choreography reveals how the body already participates in these cycles, quietly tracing them through the rhythms of everyday existence. 

The notion of circularity reaches its climax in the section Kanouté refers to as cyphering, a practice drawn from hip-hop culture: the cypher becomes a space where performers enter a shared circle, responding to one another through rhythm, gesture, voice, and improvisation. In Rewind, this structure transforms earlier fragments into exchange: movements travel from body to body, reappearing altered, amplified, or absorbed into the group’s collective vocabulary. As dancers enter and leave the circle, each takes a solo turn while the others hold the space, attentive and supportive of each other. Movements are repeated, revisited, drawn backward through the body as if memory itself were being tested through motion – or a memory that does not entirely belong to it. As if it opened a connection to those who came before. 

It is precisely here that the idea of “rewind” takes on its clearest form: not as a return to the beginning, but as coming full circle. Small fragments of experience – inherited traces, gestures and details carried through a time that precedes and exceeds us, once seeming marginal or forgotten – enter into a relation and retroactively produce meaning. They reveal themselves as something the body has been carrying all along, until the moment they become necessary. To come full circle is to recognise that it has all been leading here all along.

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.

If we accept the definition of identity as ‘the unique set of characteristics that can be used to identify a person as themselves and no one else’, then the body can become a powerful way of questioning such a definition. 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.