People United

Taking hands, raising a clenched fist, holding each other, a kiss…

For more than ten years, choreographer Joanne Leighton has  meticulously collected photographs of people gathering together. From  celebration to protest to ritual, from one side of the world to another,  nearly a thousand images make up this corpus. This atlas of images is  the starting point for a new dance work entitled People United, which, after 9000 Steps and Songlines, completes a trilogy of work dedicated to universal, shared movements. 

Nine stunning dancers melt into these photos and bring them to flesh  in scenes of jubilation, demonstration, carneval, and dance. Joanne  Leighton’s movement vocabulary is authentic and raw. The dancers bring  to life different people from diverse origins, men, women and children,  without ever imitating them. They are inhabited by the memories of sites  of the images and framed by the scenography, a perpetual wind, which  seems to come from another time.

A layered soundscape composed by Peter Crosbie intertwines the work,  featuring brass bands, percussion, celebratory songs and speeches from  Martin Luther King to Greta Thunberg.

Through the repetition of images, juxtaposition and layering, the  piece is like a moving cartography of visual knowledge, the group seem  to bring back ancestral gestures. These movements unite us all and form  the basis of our humanity. Tender or provocative, sheltered or exposed,  between chaos and immobility, their bodies give rise to a powerful  physical language, both familiar and shared.