- Publication
- Accueil Studio
- Coproduction
- 05.03.2026
Created at the Ménagerie de Verre on March 12, Motor Unit was born from the dialogue that Sati Veyrunes sustains, within the same space, the same time, and the same body, with two choreographic works, those of Erna Ómarsdóttir and Adrienn Hód. For her, performance becomes a curatorial act, situated between transmission and re-creation.
“Erna Ómarsdóttir and Adrienn Hód entered my life at different stages of my artistic journey. Erna helped me understand that the dancer with all the layers of their presence is fully engaged in the choreographic form: facial expressions, screams, silences, emptiness… It is an incredibly powerful way of creating images. I also love her relationship to effort, which she turns into a form of stage truth.”
“Adrienn Hód had seen Hope Hunt & the Ascension into Lazarus, which Oona Doherty had passed on to me in 2020, and I discovered Adrienn’s work during the same festival. I was fascinated by the extreme agency she grants the performer, through a practice that is at once structured and improvised. A two-year correspondence followed, and little by little the obvious idea of bringing these two choreographic languages into dialogue began to emerge.”
“Motor Unit seeks to give this diptych a strong sense of unity. The title, Motor Unit, refers to the smallest motor unit of choreography, the smallest anatomical cell that sets movement in motion: the performer’s body as the primary driving force. To achieve this, the stage device returns to a form of nakedness, almost no set, almost no artifice, just a stripped-down space.”
Above all, Sati Veyrunes makes questions of choreographic transmission and therefore of continuity, passage, and duration the guiding thread of the work.
“Erna Ómarsdóttir and Adrienn Hód are both deeply connected to the idea of persistence. To persist is to put something back into play while embracing change. It is what allows us to pass the baton, to maintain a relationship with the original material while transforming it. It means reactivating without reproducing.”
“To persist refers both to the physical dimension of performance and to the process of transmitting a work so that it can evolve and transform.”
By reactivating an excerpt from IBM 1401, A User’s Manual by Erna Ómarsdóttir, Sati Veyrunes conceives of dance as a practice in which interpretation and creation are inseparable.
“What will I search for within myself in order to move through these choreographic languages, and to allow them to move through me? I am both traversed by them and the one who brings this form into existence, both receiver and agent. That is what moves me about this profession. I am not trying to execute a form; I am trying to be inhabited by it and to bring it to life. In this act of transmission, something remains, something escapes, and something new is born.”
Motor Unit thus asserts a rare position: that of the performer as a principle of creation. No longer merely the executor of an external vision, but the one who chooses, connects, inhabits, and orchestrates. Here, the performer becomes the motor unit the inventor of pathways between works, choreographic languages, and presences.
“Every act of interpretation seeks this third space: the point where the form meets the audience, and where something shifts and is transformed.”
“Motor Unit” by Sati Veyrunes
March 12, 13, and 14, 2026 at Ménagerie de Verre in Paris, as part of the Les Indomptés festival.
And on March 20 and 21, 2026 at KLAP Maison pour la danse in Marseille.
A co-production of the CCN Ballet National de Marseille as part of the Accueil Studio program.