MALDONNE

Presented at New York Live Arts,Maldonne marks the North American premiere of French
choreographer Leïla Ka, whose work arrives with a striking blend of theatricality and grit. Performed by five dancers, the piece probes the architecture of femininity, not as an aesthetic, but as a system of expectations that shapes posture, gesture, and survival.

Ka constructs a choreographic world where unison feels both comforting and coercive, and where sudden ruptures register as acts of defiance. The movement vocabulary is expansive and exacting: bodies fling themselves into space, recoil, gather, and press forward again, as if testing the limits of what they have been taught to contain. Rather than settling into a single thesis, Maldonne accumulates tensions, between strength and vulnerability, individuality and assimilation, spectacle and sincerity. In doing so, it frames the stage as a site of negotiation, asking not simply how femininity is performed, but what it costs to inhabit it fully.

In Maldonne, the dresses are not mere props but active collaborators in this inquiry into identity and constraint. Each garment becomes a surface to be wrestled with, dragged through the air, knotted, shrugged on, or abandoned as the choreography unfolds. Designed by Ka herself, the costumes range from shimmering evening gowns to simple day dresses, sequined and soft, structured and weightless, each carrying a tactile sense of history and expectation that the dancers confront and transform onstage.

The ensemble animating this densely layered costume world includes Océane Crouzier, Jennifer Dubreuil Houthemann, Jane Fournier Dumet (also serving as choreographic assistant), Ka, Jade Logmo, and alternate Justine Agator, each bringing a distinct physicality and emotional temperature to the work’s shifting terrain. What ultimately lingers is the movement itself, restless, explosive, and unexpectedly comic.

Ka drives the performers through whiplash shifts in tone: pounding unison dissolves into chaoticsprints, bodies collide, recover, and reassemble with breathless precision. There is a delicious excess to it all. Skirts tangle; performers yank fabric over their heads in near-panic; stylized gestures tip into something bordering on farce. The dancers glare, preen, stomp, and spiral with exaggerated resolve, both embodying and quietly mocking the roles they inhabit.

he humor is sharp, even subversive. By allowing the choreography to verge on the absurd, Maldonne exposes the theatricality embedded in gender performance itself. We laugh, then wince, recognizing the truth inside the exaggeration. By the final moments, the stage feels like a battleground turned carnival, where virtuosity and satire coexist, and where the body claims agency not just through endurance, but through biting, unapologetic wit.

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Frankie Lehr

***All Leïla Ka: “Maldonne” photos by Maria Baranova, Courtesy New York Live Arts