Beyond human: Montpellier Danse festival delivers one feat after another

This year’s celebration of contemporary dance in the French city is bold, baffling and breathtaking, with some high-voltage performers

Launched in 1981, the pioneering Montpellier Danse festival changed the face of contemporary dance, in France and beyond. In 2024, its own face changed when long-term figurehead Jean-Paul Montanari was succeeded by a four-person directorship of Hofesh Shechter, Jann Gallois, Dominique Hervieu and Pierre Martinez – though the programme currently continues its ethos of spreading dance across the city, and mixing the recherché with the popular.

Gallois’ Imminentes aims squarely at a general audience: an hour-long dynamo for six women that is never abstruse and always striking – if not always subtle. Its signature device, the long build-up, comes in from the start: the women lean in to each other in tender pairs, then gradually meld together into a dynamic and increasingly mobile group, bonded by linked arms and synced energies. Backing them is a crescendo of sound, and a bank of lights that ends up glowing as if powered by the sheer voltage that the dancers generate.