for 12 dancers

Olympiade evokes the spirit of our time and its many manifestations. What challenges our Western approach to time? How can we broaden our horizons in order to access another understanding of space-time and its implications?
For this exploration—developing between research field, battlefield, and playground—an athletics track is used. With its lanes separated by white lines that evoke the unquestionable, solitary singularity of each being who runs through it, the track becomes animated by bodies that, through dance, move not only across space but also through time. The bodies on stage are individuals, yet as a group they form a single entity.
Through the choreographies created by the duo behind the company Kor’sia, Antonio De Rosa and Mattia Russo, the dancers of the Ballet de l’Opéra Grand Avignon embody the possibility of a new relationship with time: past and present follow one another without any dimension prevailing, anticipating, or succeeding the other. From this approach to the temporal dimension of bodies, dance traces trajectories with neither beginning nor end, also touching upon the notion of identity and rendering it open and fluid.
Within this system, which considers all possibilities, individual and collective identities merge and overlap, creating a network of relationships with infinite boundaries, where the dialogue between singularity and collectivity may reach a new evolutionary phase.
In this creation—set on a portion of an athletics track—the performers dance a choreography shaped by this iconic and timeless space. They travel through time in every direction, blending their identities in the present while searching for a possible future. The choreographic research and creative process engages with the idea of tradition, questioning it while exploring its projections, its ghosts, and its potential evolutions.
Dance unfolds to rhythms that challenge the passage of time. We dance at full speed, against a devouring sense of loss, in favor of a more welcoming notion of mutation and change.
Olympiade aims to share with the audience the right rhythm that allows different times, personalities, and realities to coexist.