Euphoria, exhaustion and pleasure… An intensity of each moment – of each movement – is conveyed by The Great Ball. 8 dancers come to look for what society does not have to offer: quenching a desire to touch and to be touched, a joy that does not need words and the ecstatic feeling of letting go. Their emotions are easily identifiable and are called anger, desire and compassion. From traditional Occitan melodies to exhilarating electronic beats, choreographers Souhail Marchiche and Mehdi Meghari set an increasingly quick and contagious pace carrying away all this crowd into a mesmerizing collective trance.

Is a man a wolf to another man? Two brothers, Christian and François Ben Aïm envision their dancers as a pack with a contagious energy, like the heroes and heroines of a Homeric battlefield. 10 interpreters throw themselves onto the stage with all their might, giving in to a furious desire to live. Their arms and legs are powered by instinctive, absurd and ecstatic moves. Out of themselves, do those beings become marionettes, strangers to each other? Or does something as old as the world come back to the surface to carry them away and bring them closer, in some human and mending collective momentum?

And there was light! There is a whole world on the stage: 15 dancers from various origins, whom Hervé Koubi asked – just this once– to dance as if the world were going to cease to exist. This urgency leads to a ballet with prodigious and visibly endless momentum, with interpreters’ vigor seeming to regenerate indefinitely. Figures from hip-hop, circus, capoeira or even breakdance mix with contemporary sounds and music by Steve Reich and Beethoven. Sol Invictus (“undefeated sun” in Latin) addresses the vital, irrepressible and happy need to dance.