First Light

Ermira Goro's explores the tension between the habits that carry us and the impulse to move otherwise through a live negotiation. The performers move together within a shared code, yet each gesture contains the opportunity to depart from it, to hesitate, to resist, to choose another direction. To step outside the pattern is to risk getting lost beyond it – usually in a solitary loss of balance that, now and then—instinct or chance?—manages to spread into a shared state.

On stage, this tension is difficult to resolve, echoing a broader condition in which structures persist even as they strain. Amid this instability, Goro’s work challenges fixed ideas of identity as cultural behaviour and prescribed roles by allowing norms to unravel. The tension finds its only temporary resolution in the moment of imbalance itself: when the body slips out of what it has learned to repeat, and another way of being might briefly appear.

Ermira Goro is an artist developing interdisciplinary movement practices in which the body operates as a site of negotiation, composition and transformation. Her artistic path began in Albania and Greece and later continued in New York, where encounters with international dance scenes shaped her early choreographic work. Moving between creation, performance and pedagogy, Goro has collaborated with artists and institutions across contexts, including an extended engagement with DV8 Physical Theatre.

One evening. Two performances.

The dance evening titled Bodies of Identity, Identities of Body brings together collaborations by Ermira Goro and Smaïl Kanouté with En–Knap Group, approaching identity as an unstable and continuously produced relation between body, imagination and social context. 

Across two distinct works, identity does not appear as inheritance or a fixed position, but as something questioned through movement. Repeated, interrupted, changed.  Both works treat the body as a site of inscription – shaped by heritage and memory, animated by desire, and charged by collective energy, yet never fully contained by them. The body signifies identity while simultaneously exceeding it, falling short and overflowing at once. In this tension, movement becomes a means of imagining who we are, who we might become, and how we exist together – a question that unfolds not only on a broader social level, but also within this specific group of six dancers, a collective suspended between what has been and what is emerging. The dance diptych is, in fact, Mattia Cason’s first project in his role as the ensemble’s new artistic director.