After graduating from P.A.R.T.S. in 2016, Cassiel Gaube devoted three years to studying house dance between Paris and New York. From what began as a discovery and grew into a passion emerged Soirée d’études, an encounter carefully choreographed between house dance and contemporary dance.

While house music emerged in Chicago during the 1980s, house dance flourished in New York’s gay clubs in the early 1990s. In France, this celebratory and community-driven club dance took root through pioneering crews such as Mission Impossible and Wanted Posse.

Cassiel Gaube’s aim, however, is not to recreate the club culture in which house dance was born. Without betraying its fundamentally social nature, what interests him is the way it functions as a “synthesis” of multiple dance forms hip-hop, groove, salsa, tap, and more. His project explores how a shared vocabulary of steps, drawn from a diversity of movement practices, has been shaped and passed on within communities of dancers that continue to evolve. With Soirée d’études, Cassiel Gaube seeks to extend this ongoing exploration:

“What I do is not about creating ex nihilo. It is, rather, a process of transforming existing forms, in the hope of contributing to the emergence of forms that are even more complex, more thoughtful, and more stimulating.”

This is why he describes his work as a “study.” In music, an étude is conceived as an exploration of the possibilities of a technique. Yet Soirée d’études is performed without music. Instead, Cassiel Gaube investigates the musicality of the body itself of movement, and of the shared vocabulary of gestures and rituals that define house dance.

“What I try to do in Soirée d’études is to explore, through each individual ‘study’, the compositional possibilities of a particular parameter of house dance.”

Conceived as a series of short pieces nested within one another, this “evening of studies” is an attempt to map the lexicon of house dance. Each étude explores a specific technique or parameter—walking, running, breathing, and more. To do so, Cassiel Gaube chose the format of a trio, foregrounding the relational nature of this social dance while exploring the ways different bodies interpret the same movement differently. It is precisely within this space of individual freedom that the essence of house dance emerges: an inclusive and plural form, shaped by difference rather than uniformity.

After a series of cancellations and postponements caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Soirée d’études finally premiered in May 2021 at Les Subsistances in Lyon.