THE ARTS CENTER
Performance

Arab World Premiere

Sol Invictus — Cie Hervé Koubi

Presented with the support of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels

Thu-Fri, Sep 5-6 @ 7:30pm, 2024

The Red Theater, The Arts Center

Past Event
  • Imaginative contemporary dance and kinetic urban dance meet in this work by the brilliant choreographer whose company was last seen at The Arts Center in What the Day Owes to The Night

    In Sol Invictus, a fervent ode to the unifying power of dance in a turbulent world, seventeen male and female dancers operate as a tight-knit collective, emphasizing shared responsibility for each other alongside personal accountability. This luminous ballet mixes hip-hop physicality and classic elevation with aerial style. Through beauty and grace, Koubi declares his love towards dance: to its past, to its present, and to its future.

    Sol Invictus, ‘the unconquered sun’, not only refers to the Roman god of the sun but also to a ritual during the annual Roman Midwinter festival which celebrated the passing of the darkest days, anticipating better, sunnier days ahead. And that celebration, that hope, for me, is precisely what Sol Invictus is all about,” explains Koubi.

    With Sol Invictus, Koubi wishes to stage in the flesh, and above all in light, the fact that love is the guarantor of peace, in a world which, despite the outbreak of perpetual war, conceals a force more powerful – that of communion.“I want to talk about light, solidarity, and those bonds that unite us,” says Koubi. “Here, the sun and the dance will emerge victorious.”

    They Fly. They Spin. They Change How You See the Amazing. In Compagnie Hervé Koubi’s Sol Invictus, the dancers’ extraordinary moves are integrated into a poetic vision…The dancers of Compagnie Hervé Koubi spend a lot of time upside down. Inverted, they spin on one or both hands or on their heads, legs spiraling. Upright, they bound into the air, as if off trampolines, ball up their bodies and rapidly rotate in high-flying arcs. They toss one another even higher. This is all thrilling. But the distinctive aesthetic achievement of this French company is to make those extraordinary acrobatics and hip-hop power moves feel at times pedestrian, almost like walking. What for other dancers might be show-off steps are integrated into a poetic vision, a different way of being.”