It’s totally different from the younger performers’ beauty and power. With this team, we worked on the idea of the bond. Although the pandemic revealed the interconnections between bodies, it mostly underscored their absence. We are increasingly self-sufficient creatures, and our lives are increasingly fragmented. I felt it was urgent to fight against that, because bonding with the Other is a visceral necessity – it’s what gives our existence fullness and joy. And I wondered: what does it mean to be human today?

You took an interest in Inuit throat singing and the carnival in Sardinia, two age-old traditions involving sound and the body.

YP — I wanted to come back to fundamental, archaic things – to folklore. That’s actually how I began dancing. Inuit throat singing is a game played by two people, face to face, done by women, and it gives a very deep connection with self. The dancers have practised doing it, but what interests me is not for them to reproduce it in the traditional way, but to see the bodystates that it produces. In Sardinia, the Mamoiada carnival made a huge impression on me. I saw a whole village, from children to old men, carrying massive backpacks of bells and jumping to make them ring. I love the idea of making a noise together, of attaining harmony through a common act.

What choreographic material emerged from this process?

YP — In the past few years, I’ve developed a dance method called Practice. One of its fundamentals is rotation, working around 360 degrees. The idea is to unsettle the “urban stem” that we are, to propose another way of holding oneself, of letting our torso, plexus, stomach and heart move – all the life there is inside us. For this new piece, we worked on the line and the circle, two archaic figures that are present in dance rituals. Our art reveals the layers of our being, both conscious and unconscious; and those of society, of humanity, and all their inter-relationships. That, to me, is what 360 degrees is all about.

— Interview by Léa Poiré for the Biennale de la danse de Lyon.