Rewind

Kanouté’s piece turns towards a temporal register, bringing the past into dialogue with the present, with the body positioned between them as a carrier of historical density. Through an imagined encounter with one's ancestors, each dancer navigates questions of otherness, continuity and transformation. Identity unfolds through relation, through approaching the figures that precede us and remain within us. 

The temporary organism moves through different stages of becoming, of past and future selves overlapping, of past, present, and future being accessed simultaneously, shifting between them as if different strata of experience were visible all at once. This opens a sense of reality that feels expanded or augmented. In contemporary language, “augmented reality” refers to a technological overlay, a digital layer added to the world through screens and devices. Rewind approaches augmentation as the body’s capacity for awareness of the relations inhabiting this lived reality beyond the seen. The question of reality, or identity, therefore expands beyond the boundary between one person and another (“where I end and you begin”), reaching through lineages, histories, and presences that continue to inhabit the body (“where I end and those who precede and exceed me begin”).

Smaïl Kanouté is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice originates in graphic design and visual composition and extends into dance, performance, and moving image. Based in Paris, his artistic formation combines formal training at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs with embodied knowledge acquired through dance in the streets and social spaces of France, Brazil, Mali, and across Europe. Defining himself as a “choreo-graphist,” Kanouté approaches movement as a form of writing and drawing in space, where the body produces motifs, patterns, and visual rhythms that function as a living, abstract alphabet. Through Company Vivons!, founded in 2016, Kanouté develops performances, choreographic works, dance films, and hybrid formats, moving fluidly between visual art, choreography, and storytelling, and informed by collaborations across fashion, design, video, and the performing arts. 

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.