Art to a puzzling and fearful world: Here I am and I am strong

“In the case the world is in”, Anne Sauvage writes in a preface to the June Events 2026 dance performance festival, “Calling on the power of art for help might seem naive or even wrong-headed”.

But she responds that the force and sense of art is undeniable, obvious.

This year’s June Events program aims to throw the spotlight on that force and sense.

Sauvage, who is the director of Atelier de Paris/CDCN, reminded me that art, but especially the art of movement, touches on and uses the whole of the made and organic, visible and invisible, world. Addressing itself to the Imagination, the art of movement is political, committed, when both those making and observing it need the force of Imagination in their politics. And what is politics today in Minnesota or New Jersey or Chicago or Los Angeles or Selma, if not movement art, the choreography of witness and human connection both with other humans and with the world around?

Often focused on the soft sciences of understanding and healing, the art of movement also strongly builds on and works with hard knowledge. Earth, physical and mathematical sciences that have polysyllabic names are very often part of the ordinary experience of dance performance.

In this year’s edition of June Events, for instance, the hard sciences involved include “biology”, “cymatics”, “cybernetics”: the living world, vibration and frequency, information theory/systems/AI: flowers, body, air, love, Other, music, water, mind …

To enrich spectator sensory experience and to amplify perception, creators of movement art have over the years come have pretty much carte blanche when it comes to visual, sound, set and heuristic techniques and technologies.

So, inside the varied technologies and techniques, old-style participation (“Throw your hands up and sing!” for instance) may turn into “immersion” (flashing lights, surround-sound earphones or even walks in the woods). And/or creators with routinely use consumer tech stuff in ways not mentioned in the marketing brochure: a mike to monitor breath, a wide spectrum frequency generator to source a forest symphony. And/or they use heuristics punctually or to frame big psychic stuff in basic technology: for instance, a host/DJ may become a magician who then is a “priest” in a new-fangled water ritual based on the host’s childhood experience.

Finally, art, movement art or not, and only art, always addresses “the subtle body”, that’s to say, the complex and, somehow, quite precise combination of cosmic, physical and psychic porosity that enables each individual person to bean “individual person”.

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June Events 2026 began 26 May and ends 13 June 2026

Featured artists and creations in the 20^th edition of June Events include:

Mithkal Alzghair, Paisiblement (“Peaceably”)/ Emily Gualtieri & David Albert-Toth, LABOUR/ Simon Feltz, Sell, Self, Slay/ Julie Botet, Lymph Blood Story 9424/ Charlotte Rousseau, BLAST/ Julie Gouju & Scratchy, Phénomènes/ Ludivine Large-Bessette & Mathieu Calmelet, Saltation/ Marcela Santander Corvalán, Agwuas (“Water”)/ Soa Ratsifandrihana, g r oo v e/ Florencia Demestri & Samuel Lefeuvre, Holobiontes/ Julie Nioche, SUPERPOUVOIR/ Soa Ratsifandrihana & Bonnie Banane, Quelle Aurore(“What Dawn”)/ Benjamin Kahn, Focu Meu/ Michael Incarbone, Fallen Angels/ Jolie Ngemi, Make The Curtain Burn and Jeremy Nedd, Faded future - future faded: A ballroom social folk dance ritual/ Michele Di Stefano & Lorenzo Bianchi Hoesch, Veduta – atlante mediterraneo (“Atlantic Mediterranean View”)/ Alban Richard & Florentin Ginot, A Sentimental Landscape/ Samer Zaher & Bassam Abou Diab, Ancestral Echoes/ Selim Ben Safia, Labes/ Siham Ennajjary, Sab’r; Danya Hammoud, Scènes de vie (“Scenes from life”)/ Mehdi Dahkan, KMs of Resistance/ Christophe Al Haber, Fragmentation/ Habib Ben Tanfous, Orchestre vide, longing for you (“Empty orchestra, longing for you)

Atelier de Paris CDCN: https://www.atelierdeparis.org