Biennale Danza 2024

We don’t give up dancing, for above all else the human substance is movement. This is the Wayne McGregor doctrine. We trace lines of energy with the body, arabesques that stage photographers tend to visualise with the B setting of their optical devices. And if the whole body is intelligence, dance is to be taken as a “philosophical act of communication” – a sharing of human vibrations between the stage and the audience, a sharing of self, in short, with the very flow of life Dance is the most primordial of the arts – the purest of the poems of the human substance – and so it is the interaction, the tangle of bodies, the choral experience that puts the “We” ritual into being. Words always prove insufficient, and it is on the We that McGregor places the tenets of his poetics.

Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, President of La Biennale di Venezia

My fourth year as Artistic Director of the Dance Department at La Biennale di Venezia culmi- nates in an epic Festival exploring the very na- ture of what it is to be human – an eternal quest that has occupied poets and priests, philoso- phers and politicians, scientists and artists for millennia. In an age in which technology allows us to see events on the other side of our planet playing out in real time and graphic detail, we are challenged – as at no other time in history – to ques- tion where our humanity lies, and to access it through a deeper connection with our own embodied state.
We Humans are movement.
Unwrapping the great complexity, contradictions and mystery that is human life is a career preoccupation for the movement creatives invited to Biennale Danza 2024.

Wayne McGregor, Director of the Dance Department

Texts taken from WE HUMANS, catalogue of the 18th International Festival of Contemporary Dance - La Biennale di Venezia 2024