Dance as Exploration

MITSANGANA (“to rise” or “stand up” in Malagasy) is a sensorial journey — a choreographic solo where the body becomes a symbol of resistance and remembrance. Through the simple act of rising, an ordinary movement transforms into a ritual, a quest, a dialogue between the personal and the collective, between the verticality of the living and the memory of the ancestors.

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On stage, each impulse of the body seems driven by a vital necessity. To fall, to rise, to stretch: minimal gestures that carry a dense symbolic charge.The body struggles and gets back up in a cycle that is both fragile and resilient, echoing the silent effort of living, the permanence of standing tall. Each elevation holds a precarious promise, each fall a quiet defiance.

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The piece draws its strength from an artistic and academic research centered on the gesture of standing up, in resonance with a  Malagasy funerary ritual, the famadihana, (the turning of the bones). Rooted in this tradition, the solo explores the invisible threads connecting the living to their ancestors — threads of transmission, resilience, and collective memory. The upright gesture, in all its simplicity, becomes a symbolic bridge between generations, an act of passage between what once was and what endures.

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MITSANGANA does not tell a story. It summons. It invites us to feel, to perceive memory through movement, presence through effort, the sacred through repetition. A dance where gravity becomes a partner, and where the mere act of standing becomes an act of resistance, an homage to the life force that carries us forward.