Co-produced by the Ballet national de Marseille, Lenio Kaklea’s project brings together seven performers and a sound score composed of ornithological field recordings. The Birds sets out to make us experience animal otherness and to challenge the ways we perceive and represent the non-human world.

“I became interested in observing birds through conversations with Thierry Aubin, Research Director at the CNRS. He introduced us to recordings of colonies made up of millions of birds living on remote islands. The birds communicate with one another. They have names, they express their emotions, they fight over territory…”

Far removed from any mimetic intent, Lenio Kaklea approaches the figure of the bird as a choreographic inquiry, drawing on a rich lineage within dance history from classical ballet to Beach Birds by Merce Cunningham and Bird Dances by Noah Eshkol, both of which have been important sources of inspiration for her.

“A bird’s wing is articulated differently, inviting us to imagine other ways of using the arm. Birds have an extraordinary, jerky mobility of the head. They walk while looking sideways. They dry their wings by raising them toward the sky…”

Rooted in a practice shaped by social critique, feminism, and ecology, Lenio Kaklea also invites us to see the bird as a figure of decentring one capable of defying gravity and renegotiating our identities. As in Aristophanes, birds become agents that unsettle a form of anthropocentrism whose destructiveness has become impossible to ignore.

“I want to create a piece performed by human bodies that is capable of transporting us toward otherness. The aim is to push beyond conventional ideas of bodily expressivity and, through the evocation of birds, imagine a hybrid, non-human body…”

To follow them is to venture across a kind of border:

“Hybridity and identities that resist easy recognition are fascinating to explore through movement. They raise questions of boundaries and border-crossing, and of how we inhabit and share space with others.”

“The piece began with a few basic movement phrases. From there, each performer developed their own physical language, which gradually became a shared vocabulary, woven together between the dancers. This creates moments of displacement, unison, and dissonance alike.

For me, this subject is a choreographic challenge. What matters most is offering an experience that is at once visual, emotional, formal, and critical.”

Yet Lenio Kaklea’s The Birds rejects any form of idealism. Against a constantly shifting, video-projected sky unfold moments of both turmoil and calm a changing emotional weather through which performers move in costumes inspired by Alexander McQueen’s punk runway collections.

THE BIRDS
World Premiere

30 June – 1 July 2025
Théâtre de La Vignette, Montpellier
Presented as part of Montpellier Danse

4–5 July 2025
KLAP – Maison pour la danse, Marseille
Presented as part of the Festival de Marseille