Following Au Cœur, the result of a collaboration with a folk dance ensemble from northern Aveyron, Dalila Belaza imagines with Figures a ritual unbound by history or geography.

The origins of Figures can be traced back to the three years of laboratory work Dalila Belaza carried out with the Lous Castelous group, which brought her into contact with what she calls “a language that comes from afar.” This first encounter sparked questions about the rootedness of traditional dance and the sense of a distant history, of a remote space-time that fascinated her. From there emerged a desire “to plunge into a kind of unconscious” and to summon a buried collective memory into the present.

With Figures, Dalila Belaza seeks to create “a ritual without a past, existing entirely in the present.” But how can one transmit a ritual without roots, one that exists only as a “fully abstract form”? Unlike Au Cœur, this solo is not meant to be tied to any recognizable traditional dance or cultural heritage. On the one hand, the challenge is “not to territorialize history.” On the other, it is to ground the gesture in the feeling that “it comes from afar across space, across time, and from within.” In this way, the intimate yet universal narrative that emerges becomes the foundation for multiple interpretations.

While Au Cœur explored confrontation, encounter, and the possibility of dialogue between Belaza’s dance and that of Lous Castelous—between the individual and the community Rive (revived in 2023 following a first version presented in 2021 as part of the Festival Parallèle with dancers from the Ballet national de Marseille) took rhythm as its starting point to create a sense of group cohesion within a community. This line of inquiry continued in 2022 with Figures, in which the spectator is immersed in abstraction, allowing a collective story to emerge.