‘Gravité’ @ Ballet Preljocaj (from TITAS/Dance Unbound)

—Teresa Marrero

If you were lucky enough to catch Ballet Preljocaj’s Gravité on October 31 or November 1 at Moody Performance Hall, this review may echo what the audience experienced—awe and appreciation, as demonstrated by one of the longest standing ovations I have witnessed during a TITAS/Dance Unbound presentation. Frankly, the emotional pitch was so high that I found myself wiping involuntary tears of joy. If you did not see it, perhaps this review may evoke a faint resemblance to the experience.

Gravité thwarts expectations.

While I thought this piece would battle against its namesake, it is just the opposite; it surrendered to it. It began with twelve amorphous figures on the floor, like an abstract landscape, ever so slowly and imperceptibly moving into action. Captivating.

Eventually, slow motion meets the dancers’ perfection and strength finely tuned to the millisecond. It is a place where the weight of physics meets the fluidity and strength of the human body. Here twelve incredibly strong male and female dancers (six and six, credits at the end), seem both bound by and released from gravity’s invisible laws.

Angelin Preljocaj’s choreography renders the elemental concept of gravity in a sublimely spectacular piece lasting one hour and twenty minutes. The international cast of dancers made for a visually interesting field. Frankly, I lost all sense of time until the arrival of Ravel’s Boléro towards the end.

A Choreography That Thinks and Feels

The piece oscillates between tension and surrender. Movements unfold as though in dialogue with gravitational forces, some gestures fall with inevitability while others resist, defy, hover. In this balance, Preljocaj achieves something rare: a choreography that thinks and feels simultaneously.

The dancers’ bodies are both instruments of calculation and vessels of breath, each phrase tracing the delicate boundary between control and abandon, intellect and sensation. Through this balance, Preljocaj suggests that the scientific quest and the spiritual impulse are not opposites, but parallel expressions of awe. With an even number of dancers in the ensemble, these yield to variations in groups ranging from solos to duos to a three-woman piece that felt like a marvel of strength and endurance. Gravity is not limitational but challenging. It engages with the body´s defiance of natural laws and the choreographer´s penchant towards balance amidst seeming chaos.

Preljocaj’s movement language in Gravité oscillates between release and control, as if each dancer negotiates a personal internal and external gravitational pull. There are moments of extended holds on postures that stress the muscles in harrowing ways. However, there were no shaky legs or sweaty brows discernible in the effort. Each articulation of the skeletal system is called up to move in unpredictable ways. The segment that my friend called ´the eggbeater hands´ had the wrists quickly move circularly, one hand over the other, while the rest of the body was executing a different move. A marvel!

The choreography unfolds in waves. Arms slice through space like vectors, torsos yield and recover, and the ensemble moves with a collective intelligence that recalls celestial systems. The precision is mathematical, yet the effect is anything but mechanical; each gesture carries a knowing.

Duets become miniature gravitational dramas with moments of attraction and repulsion, of collisions narrowly avoided. In these exchanges, Preljocaj distills the physics of intimacy by the way bodies resist, then draw closer, acknowledge each other´s humanity, then continue their individual paths.

One of the (many) memorable parts is one in which female dancers move forward slowly and deliberately, giving the impression that the men laid out horizontally at their feet were being dragged by the women. Frankly, I have never seen this pairing of movement before. And I am grateful for the gender awareness that refrained from making women the object being dragged. I recognized a great respect for both male and female dancers in this choreography.

Sounding the Cosmos: Music as Gravitational Field

The varied score of Gravité operates as its own gravitational system, pulling together fragments from across centuries and genres, taking us on a journey across time and space. Bach and Daft Punk, Xenakis and Shostakovich, Philip Glass and the electronic murmurs of 79 D, even the disembodied voice of Stephen Hawking relate cosmic illuminations. Each sound source orbits the others in precarious balance, sometimes clashing, sometimes merging in harmonic convergence. This collision of sound worlds mirrors the choreography’s exploration of the spectacularly sublime: the coexistence of order and chaos, of the mathematical and the human.

While I attempted to codify the various movements of this choreography, at one point I simply put down my pen and yielded to the experience.

Hawking’s faint voiceover punctuates this field like the astrophysicist’s disembodied presence, grounding abstraction in human finitude. “Nothing can escape the event horizon,” he reminds us. Preljocaj’s dancers huddle in a circle, an imaginary black hole whose gravitational pull does not allow escape.

Curiously, the next movement brings us back to a very French musical tradition with Ravel’s Boléro (1928)—as if Gravité were in planetary alignment with this universally recognized piece. The whole thing reminded me of where our feet are planted, here on Earth, a circular structure, in a ring of interconnected humanity. During the talkback I asked the choreographer if there was a conscious effort to allude to another French work, Henri Matisse’s painting ¨The Dance¨ (1909). He said no but added that he liked the reference to the circular, fluid structure of this painting. To me, the reference may have been unintentional but irrefutable.

Surprisingly, after so many movements in the 120-minute structure of Gravité, the entire 15 minutes of Boléro was performed. As an anecdotal comment, the choreographer recalled how this piece was incorporated into Gravité: He played Boléro as a sort of respite for the dancers after a demanding initial rehearsal. To his amazement, the music worked as an elixir, reenergizing them. Thus, the entire piece made its way into the final mix.

It worked beautifully. As the melody repeats, layer upon layer, the choreography mirrors that insistence: bodies returning to the same phrase, each time altered by gravity’s pull. While Hawking’s disembodied voice stretches across the beyond, Gravité reminds us that human curiosity, like Ravel’s rhythm, never truly resolves.

Visual Architecture of Weight: Lighting and Costumes

Lighting serves as both atmosphere and metaphor. Working within a monochromatic palate in shades of black, grey and neutrals, stark beams cut through darkness like the scanner at a checkout counter. Overhead lighting narrows the focus sometimes. Then, in a shift almost imperceptible, the light softens into a diffused glow, transforming the stage into a nebula of moving silhouettes. To further amplify the cosmic aesthetic, the costume palette mirrors this aesthetic. It is streamlined and minimal, ranging from metallic greys, chalk white, to pale neutrals.

This palette also erases hierarchy among the dancers, turning the ensemble into a moving constellation rather than a collection of ranking individuals. The absence of color allows attention to shift toward the play of texture and reflection on the body. In a gender non-conforming manner, male dancers wear striped skirts just as the female dancers. If the idea was to strip away adornment until only pure motion remained, the result is ascetic yet luminous, evoking the paradox of the spectacularly sublime: simplicity as grandeur, control as expression.

An End that Does Not

The ending brings us back to the beginning in a full circular motion. Each dancer returns to the ground, as the fate of all human beings. Although a singular female dancer resists, she too must yield to the inevitable.

In a nutshell, what feels transcendental in Gravité is an exquisite metaphysical awareness of being.

Hats off to France´s cultural support for the arts. Within this milieu, company members are paid a steady salary. They are employed full-time as artists, creating a synergy that, through the years, becomes a sort of ¨creative short-hand communication system¨ (Preljocaj in the talkback).

And, despite snafus in getting to Dallas due to visa issues, the company made us, the audience, respond to them with a sweeping and resounding round of applause, bravos, and unfettered shouts of absolute approval and admiration.

Bravo!

And thanks to the TITAS organization for bringing them to us. May the experience be repeated… but perhaps not during Halloween!

WHEN: October 31 and November 1, 2025
WHERE: Moody Performance Hall, Dallas Arts District
WEB: titas.org

Credits: Artistic Director-Choreographer: Angelin Preljocaj
Dancers: Angie Armand, Liam Bourbon Simeonov, Clara Freschel, Mar Gómez Ballester, Paul-David Gonto, Lucas Hessel, Verity Jacobsen, Beatrice La Fata, Yu-Hua Lin, Florine Pegat-Toquet, Valen Rivat-Fournier, Leonardo Santini.

Music: Ravel, Bach, Xenakis, Shostakovich, Daft Punk, Phillip Glass, 79D.
Costumes: Ogor Chapurin
Lighting: Éric Soyer

Teresa Marrero, Ph.D. is Professor in the Dept. of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the Univ. of North Texas. She specializes in Performance Studies in Dance and Theater. https://class.unt.edu/people/m-teresa-marrero.html Teresa.Marrero@unt.edu