“The Victim”. Stravinsky even considered using this title for what would became the historical, revolutionary ballet, "The Rite of Spring" (1913). The historian Modris Eksteins recounts this episode in his book "Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age" (1989). Eksteins links Stravinsky's victim to the unknown soldier decimated by the two Great Wars and who remains an anonymous figure in history. Starting from “The Rite of Spring” he presents the dance of death, with “its orgiastic-nihilist irony”, as “one of the supreme symbols of our centrifugal and paradoxical century, which fights for freedom while simultaneously acquiring the power of ultimate destruction. ” This revolutionary dance emerges as a paradigm example of the radical ruptures that the world has experienced, far beyond the world of dance and its protagonists.

In the 21st century, in the tenth edition of the GUIdance festival, are we still talking about a dance of death? If so, what death? Or what deaths? And what is left of humanity?

These are times of crisis, as is true of every age. The housing crisis, ecological crisis, crisis of democracy, crisis of the acceptance of difference, the crisis of the resurgence of extremism, the crisis of political representation… The 2020 edition of GUIdance addresses the symptoms of the current era, through creators of an artistically emancipated dance, who are concerned about the world we live in. In a different way, these creations articulate proposals in the same artistic experience – that is simultaneously poetic, philosophical, musical, visual, literary – which makes us think and feel about the world in which we live, from very different perspectives. Using dance as a language for encounters, we propose two conversations that will foster an exchange of views and ideas between artists, thinkers and different sensibilities, highlighting the diversity that will once again set the tone of this year’s festival, which includes a significant presence of female artists.