Directed and choreographed by Maud Blandel, Same Old Songs is a dance piece for three performers that adapts Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas into a hallucinatory, psychedelic stage language. In a percussive, ultra‑energetic and deliberately disorganized flow, the work probes the relation between sound and movement through an anarchic performativity in which every attempt at marching is deliberately sabotaged. The piece balances rigorous composition with explosive bodily unpredictability to unsettle conventions of ensemble movement.

Choreographed by Bruno Freire, this conference-dance draws on the words of philosopher and indigenous activist Ailton Krenak to weave speech and movement into a contemplative ritual. Sparse, precise choreography meets layered soundscapes and embodied testimony, investigating resilience, loss and collective imagination. The piece stages intimate encounters between language and flesh, proposing aesthetic strategies to delay catastrophe and reimagine possible futures. Presented within the VIVA festival, the work favours reflection over spectacle.

Cherish Menzo’s Frank interrogates the figure of the monster as a cultural mirror. Through distortion-driven movement, four performers create a charged ritual that blends apocalypse, carnival and corporeal abstraction. Menzo reframes Frankenstein motifs to probe Black identity, threading images and texts on mortality into a choreography that is both visceral and uncanny. Part of a triptych following JEZEBEL and DARKMATTER, the work explores diaspora intersections with striking physicality and metaphorical intensity.

Choreographed by Tiran Willemse, SYNTHETIC / Artefact expands his investigation of dance history through an afrosurrealist lens. Building on his earlier solos, the ensemble work examines the doll as object and cultural symbol, shifting between realism and artifice. The piece interrogates archives while proposing speculative inventions, foregrounding the beauty and agency of living bodies that resist being reduced to mere objects. A rigorous yet poetic choreography, it blends historical inquiry with sensory, theatrical invention.

Choreographer and performer Trajal Harrell places music at the heart of his practice in this solo. Revisiting tracks embedded in his consciousness, he traces how time reshapes the body, the heart and the mind, and what remains. The piece stages a dialogue with the lived history of the choreographed body, reaching beyond individual biography to examine memory, rhythm and presence. Created in 2026 in collaboration with Théâtre Vidy‑Lausanne.

Choreographed by Lia Rodrigues and Simon Wehrli, this year’s Bachelor performance gathers emerging dancers from La Manufacture in a bold exploration of movement, ensemble and creation. The programme marks the tenth anniversary of the contemporary dance bachelor, foregrounding collective energy, rigorous technique and theatrical immediacy. The choreography alternates intimate duets and explosive group sequences, framed by inventive stagecraft and a kinetic score, offering a vivid portrait of youthful voices shaping contemporary dance today.