Les Indes galantes

Les Indes Galantes, an opera-ballet written by Jean Philippe Rameau in 1735, was inspired by a Native American dance from Louisiana as performed by the chief of the Metchigaema in Paris in 1723. For this piece, Clément Cogitoire (FR, 1983, based in Paris) reworks a section of the ballet with a group of krump dancers – an art form born in predominantly black neighbourhoods of Los Angeles in the 1990s. Against a backdrop of police violence and riots following the murder of Rodney King, young dancers used krumping as a means to express the physical, political and social tensions they experienced.

Placed together, the tribal dance of 1723 and today’s krump dancers disrupt histories of people and culture to tell a new story about young people dancing on a volcano.