CHOREOGRAPHIC ENSEMBLE OF THE PARIS CONSERVATOIRE

Two choreographers, Paris-based Leila Ka and Robin Orlin of South Africa, created works on the Choreographic Ensemble of the Paris Conservatoire, ( masters students) performed at L’Alliance New York, Florence Gould Theater as part of the Van Cleef & Arpels Dance Festival 2026.

Leila Ka’s you’re the one we love, originally a duet and now staged on ten young pre-professional dancers opened the evening. A single phrase of Baroque harpsichord music is intermittently heard as the ten, dressed in white tights and grey shirts, staged in tight formation, dance in unison, executing karate-like stabbing, lunging, falling movements, with sharp, audible breaths as their sound score. The same phrases are repeated precisely and relentlessly.

The group stands and waits, sometimes with small collapses of effort before beginning the defiant group phrase again. Formations change facings, but the movement stays the same, with slight variation in the order of accumulation.  

The same music is heard with increases in volume and intensity. Sounds of gunshots pierce the music; the dancers keep at it…charging forward with vehemence, then falling, and recovering. They seem to be witnessing war or destruction, mystified by the unknown as they look up, gazing and wondering about what is next. 

Soon their voices connect with their movements as they yell “ha” several times before stopping. They turn to the audience, with a final “ha,” as if to include us as complicit in their concern or perhaps at fault for causing their youthful outrage. Throughout, the dancers perform with intense focus and commitment. 

Robin Orlin’s when we change the landscape…it is with our bare hands or with gloves, a new piece billed as “exploring the cultural and political realities on South Africa.” Orlin is credited with her use of multimedia: text, video, plastic arts, and is nicknamed in South Africa as a “permanent irritation.” Indeed, the audience was expected to somewhat comprehend an amorphous array of nine dancers crawling and cavorting on stage, as video projections on the back cyc show fingers and hands with and without green gloves crawling up and down faces, necks, and arms, and into mouths. Are they insects? 

They play with a fake body dressed in gold lamé, flying it overhead; eventually pulling a red fabric from its innards (blood perhaps)?  This fabric ends up on the floor. They dance on top of it, before plunging inside as though ingested by an organism. Tutus fall from the sky on top of this red tent with the dancers inside, but wait…we get to see parts of their bodies projected on the scrim because they are still videotaping themselves in close up.  They spit. They drool. Limbs emerge here and there, only to be engulfed again in the fabric.

Eventually emerging (Mother-Ginger-like), they braid the fabric around them as they are now connected in a caterpillar-like line, extravagantly adorned in the tutus, headdresses, and body paint.  Are they metamorphosing? 

They point the camera at the audience, placing it downstage, and we get to witness ourselves watching them parade off the stage and into the audience, blowing kisses as they exit.      

It was difficult for this viewer to stay focused. The section under the red fabric continued for an interminable time, without any progression in its repetitive imagery. Since the dancers were submerged in cloth, there was little to keep our attention. …Ultimately, the piece felt unfulfilled and the landscape unchanged, but for the exceptional performances carried out by nine of the ten masters students.

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Mary Seidman