Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic “What it means to be human” — a mammoth question that seems unlikely to produce definitive answers. But it’s the task British choreographer Wayne McGregor, artistic director of this year’s Venice Dance Biennale, has set himself with his title “We Humans”. This year’s programme, he writes, is an ode to the communicative and expressive potential of the human body, with a total of 160 artists performing live in Venice in 80 events. Staging its 18th edition, the Venice Dance Biennale (which is actually annual) is a landmark festival showcasing established and emerging choreographers from across the globe. This year one of its highest accolades, the Silver Lion, has been awarded to American choreographer Trajal Harrell, who rose to prominence creating performances in gallery settings that fuse postmodern dance with vogueing and Japanese Butoh dance.In the first week of the biennale, Harrell performed Sister or He Buried the Body, a 2021 solo dance which imagines that the African-American choreographer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham was the mythical long-lost sister of Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata, an idea inspired by the fact they were rumoured to have once shared a studio. Bringing together two dance pioneers from opposite ends of the world to compare and contrast their styles is an interesting idea, yet Harrell’s references wouldn’t necessarily be discernible without the programme note, especially for audiences less well-versed in dance history. This said, Harrell’s performance is still engaging. Sitting on a grass mat feet away from the audience, he metamorphoses between intense pain and joy, contorting his face, padding his feet and gesticulating his arms like a devout preacher to a soundtrack including songs by Peggy Lee and Sade. The movement language is similar to scenes from Harrell’s large-scale group works for his company Schauspielhaus Zürich. Here, however, it feels less self-indulgent, his proximity to viewers inviting them to experience an emotional journey with him. The Golden Lion for lifetime achievement went to Italian-born septuagenarian dancer, choreographer and academic Cristina Caprioli. A leading figure in Scandinavian dance, since 1998 Caprioli has created multidisciplinary works for her Stockholm-based company ccap that traverse her interests in science, academic theory and literature. In her acceptance speech Caprioli said that, when she was told she would receive the award, she realised she wouldn’t have to “defend” her practice any more. However, “such comfort is incompatible with the work. My job must be to sustain uncertainty.”Caprioli’s work is characterised by precision and complexity, as in The Bench, a new outdoor piece she developed on the 16 dancers of the Biennale College, a three-month study programme that runs alongside the festival. To a chorus of crickets, the performers move slowly along the Via Garibaldi, assuming naturalistic postures and gestures. At times, they all settle into the same positions, and it takes an exacting eye to determine who is leaning off kilter or has a different hand configuration. Later, the dancers sculpt their bodies around the street’s benches like Tetris blocks. The relationship between humans and technology emerges as a central theme at the biennale — not surprisingly, given McGregor’s own engagement with the topic. The European premiere of Waves by Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, for example, uses AI to transform the dancers’ liquid motions into digital projections that “perform” alongside them. Some of the hyper-realistic avatars feel somewhat gimmicky, especially when they wave at their human counterparts or knock on the screen they’re projected on to, as if trying to break free. However, non-anthropomorphic shapes and patterns that abstract the dancers’ bodies and correlate to their luscious, liquid movements are mesmerising.AI takes a more commanding role in Swiss choreographer Nicole Seiler’s Human in the loop, as two dancers respond to instructions generated live by computers at the side of the stage. The directions range from the simple to the silly — lift your hands above your head, perform a pigeon-like folk dance. Intermittently, they are played over the theatre’s sound system, allowing audiences to see how the dancer’s physical intelligence enables the interpretation of instructions in real time. The resulting movement is quirky and comical, yet its disjointed nature — the dancers often have to pause to wait for their next command — suggests that human choreographers are in no danger of losing their jobs any time soon. A monologue delivered by the computer about “cyborg behaviours”, inspired by the feminist cyborg scholar Donna Haraway, which apparently include using a mobile phone and taking the contraceptive pill, does raise interesting questions about how much control we give to external forces to govern our lives and bodies.While AI-infused works may be imagining the future, Afro-Colombian company Sankofa Danzafro’s European premiere of Behind the South: Dances for Manuel taps into something more ancestral. “It is important to give a voice to our history,” said choreographer Rafael Palacios after the show, underlining Colombia’s African influences. A former student of the “mother of African dance”, Germaine Acogny, Palacios explains that sankofa is a philosophy of “going back to the past to understand the future”. In Behind the South, characters range from a pregnant mother to a deity-like dancer wearing a latticed ribbon mask over their face. These figures probably hold more significance for those familiar with the novel Behind the South is based on, Colombian writer Manuel Zapata Olivella’s Changó, el gran putas, an account of 500 years of African diasporic history.Even for those who aren’t, Sankofa Danzafro’s dancers come into their own in moments of pure movement. The group forms tight phalanxes to create grounded, high-energy phrases of staccato stamps, sudden arm slices and whipping turns — one dancer’s neon-blue dreadlocks lash violently around her as she rotates — the rhythms produced by onstage drummers pulsing through their bodies. The energy is infectious: by the end of the show, the entire audience is on their feet shoulder-shrugging along with the curtain-call routine.The simple beauty of the human body in motion is also highlighted in Natural Order of Things by Guy Nader and Maria Campos, Lebanese and Spanish choreographers. A basic stepping pattern forms the foundation of the piece, which nine dancers repeat continuously in a line that swings hypnotically through space like a pendulum. Duets and groups break out to perform sweeping lifts and create kaleidoscopic patterns across the stage, maintaining a fluid, labile quality throughout. It is an elegant offering demonstrating that, even in the high-tech age, the human body in motion needs no augmentation to be arresting. Among works still to come before the biennale closes, McGregor himself will present We Humans Are Movement, a site-specific work with the 16 Biennale College students and nine dancers from McGregor’s professional company. Performed in the Sala Grande of the Palazzo del Cinema and inspired by the cinematic venue, McGregor’s choreography will explore everything from how the 3D bodies of his dancers can exist in a space dedicated to 2D imagery to camera movements, filmic techniques and choreographic structures.Once again, there are high-tech elements, including the music, directed by Benji B, and AI, which will have a “big part to play” in terms of lighting. “But really,” says McGregor, “it’s just a celebration of these young artists . . . solving physical problems together.” It sounds like a fitting note to end this humanity-focused festival on.To August 3, labiennale.org
