La Horde

An invigorating survey of the French art and dance collective explores how dance binds communities together

La Horde, Novaciéries, 2015. Single-channel video installation; projection wall, forklift, dance mats, video, 16′48′′, colour, sound. Dimensions variable. Installation view, (LA)HORDE, JSF Berlin. Photo: Alwin Lay.

Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin
27 April – 30 July 2023

by JOE LLOYD

It is night. We see a tarmac yard surrounded by concrete apartment blocks and huge warehouses. A roaming spotlight illuminates a band of young people, clad in black hoodies and tracksuits. Someone lights a torch, then a smoke stick. The youths mime hurling stones at a huge vehicle, as blue police lights flash over their bodies. Then, in retaliation, the vehicle shoots a torrent of pressurised water at the youths. A voice recounts its own experience with the cannon: “I took it in my face.” As bodies tumble in the wet jet, an audience behind a barrier lifts their phones to record the carnage.

This is the first set-piece scene of The Master’s Tools (2017), a film by the French collective La Horde that collects footage from several performances. Titled after an essay by the radical writer Audre Lorde, it transcribes a violently suppressed act of dissent into contemporary dance. Much of La Horde’s work places the politics of dance at the core of its practice. Through film, performance and sculpture, the group explores how choreographic forms occur in popular uprisings and the power of dance as a mass movement. In The Master ’s Tools, choreography becomes a way to memorialise an act of resistance and its violent suppression.

La Horde, To Da Bone, 2015. Performance, 15 min, loop. Performance documentation, Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin (26 April 2023). Photo: Frankie Casillo.

Dance as a vehicle for political commentary is nothing new. In 1922, Cole Porter composed the ballet Within the Quota, a satirical work about the US’s 1921 Immigration Act; a decade later, the German choreographer Kurt Jooss premiered The Green Table, a satire on fascism and a warning to his country. In recent years, anti-racism protestors have used dance as an expression of non-violent resistance. It is collaborative, inclusive and stresses joy even in adversity. Freedom of movement becomes a metaphor for freedom of expression. In contrast, La Horde’s video unnerves. We have little context for the protest and countermeasures depicted. All we know is that the dancers’ resistance is blasted with water cannon (of the sort that even Theresa May, when she was home secretary, once deemed too cruel for use in the UK).

La Horde, Cultes, 2019. Video, 15 min, colour, sound. Installation view, (LA)HORDE, JSF Berlin. Photo: Alwin Lay.

La Horde’s first institutional exhibition opened this spring at the Berlin branch of the Julia Stoschek Foundation. The collective was formed in 2013 and comprises three artists who bridge art and dance. Marine Brutti and Jonathan Debrouwer studied video and performance art in Strasbourg, and Arthur Harel trained as a choreographer in Paris. The group’s ascent has been swift. La Horde has exhibited art at the Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo and HangarBicocca, and, since 2019, the trio have been joint artistic directors of the Ballet National de Marseille, one of France ’s major choreographic centres. They have also achieved success outside the halls of high culture, directing stage shows for the alt-pop singer Christine and the Queens and choreographing camp, conservative-riling music videos for Sam Smith.

La Horde, Bondy, 2017. Video, 15 min 53 sec, colour, sound. Installation view, (LA)HORDE, JSF Berlin. Photo: Alwin Lay.

The works in Berlin feature less glitzy subjects. Two of them even star amateur dancers. The video installation Bondy (2017) almost serves as a statement of intent. Named for the Parisian banlieue in which it is set, it slips between several groups of people engaged in collective movement. There are masked motorcyclists racing around the streets, basketball players and cheerleaders performing in a gym, and synchronised swimmers in a domed pool. Diegetic and non-diegetic music blurs over scenes, from lilting ambient techno to the Weather Girls. The central sequence shows a huge community event attended by the suburb’s older residents. As the band plays, residents gradually lose themselves to dance. 

La Horde, Bondy, 2017. Video, 15 min 53 sec, colour, sound. Installation view, (LA)HORDE, JSF Berlin. Photo: Alwin Lay.

Bondy posits collective movement as the vital glue of a community, but it also shows how different groups are separated by their choice of activities: to each their own dance. If movement is a shared language, it is one spoken in strong, mutually unintelligible accents. The film is occasionally interrupted with clips of dance challenges from social media. While the older revellers dance facing each other, the TikToking teenagers perform for an intangible online audience. They can record tens of thousands of views; they can momentarily be glimpsed on screens across the world. Something of the energy of dancing face-to-face is lost. But dance remains a creator of community.

La Horde, Cultes, 2019. Video, 15 min, colour, sound. Courtesy of the artists and New Gallery, Paris.

Cultes (2019) shows us a place where in-person collective experience still flourishes. A meditative opening featuring bathers gives way to shots of the debris left behind after a music festival, taken from amateur footage. We see the massed tents, empty beer cans and mud-spattered attendees familiar from news coverage. The festival is a carnival of commercialism, an endlessly replicated event that has long lost the spontaneity and spirituality of its predecessors. But it is also a shared experience of colossal proportions.

The second half of the film plunges us into the moshing crowd. Planted performers enact an exaggerated version of festival-goer behaviour to a heavy trance track. Some of them are dressed as monks and nuns, in an on-the-nose nod to the idea of the festival as equivalent to a religious ritual. Each shot is punctuated with a black screen, so the viewer feels as if they are in a strobe-lit room. The effect is stomach-churning, eye-aching, ear-shattering and magnetic. Festival dancing is replayed again and again across the world, year after year, crowd after crowd, yet somehow has the feel of the impromptu, as bodies convulse and spasm to the beat.

La Horde, Novaciéries, 2015. Single-channel video installation; projection wall, forklift, dance mats, video, 16 min 48 sec, colour, sound. Dimensions variable. Installation view, (LA)HORDE, JSF Berlin. Photo: Alwin Lay.

Other pieces showcase La Horde’s work with dancers. The collective has a particular interest in jumpstyle, a frenetic dance style that emerged from 90s Belgium to become popular among gabber fans. More recently, it has been spread online through video demonstrations. Jumpstyle forms the backbone of the film Novaciéries (2015) and the performance piece To Da Bone (2015), which was performed at Julia Stoschek during the exhibition’s opening days.

La Horde, To Da Bone, 2015. Performance, 15 min, loop. Performance documentation, Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin (26 April 2023). Photo: Frankie Casillo.

Named for a classic 90s gabber track, To Da Bone (2015) sees dancers in lustrous track tops, blue jeans and casual sneakers trotted out to perform an aggressive routine. They kick and stamp while gradually spinning around. They move with intent yet remain in place, dextrously halting any forward momentum. Freestyle is energy-intensive – dancers try to expel their energy as quickly as possible, often lasting just 30 seconds – but here the troupe power through 15 minutes, their heavy breathing and swooshing limbs becoming one with the music. Is exhaustion the gateway to ecstatic experience? Only the dancers will know.