Bodies of Identity, Identities of Body

Identities are rehearsed. And undone. On stage. In the body.

Moving through the terrain of Bodies of Identity, Identities of Body, the upcoming double premiere 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. Rehearsed, as we speak.

Both treat the body as a site of inscription – shaped by heritage and memory, animated by desire, 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.

En–Knap with Smaïl Kanouté: 
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, the dancer navigates questions of otherness, continuity and transformation. Identity unfolds through relation, through approaching the figures that precede us and remain within us.

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.

En–Knap with Ermira Goro:
FIRST LIGHT

The piece explores 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.

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. Over the years, her work has been supported and presented at numerous festivals and venues in Greece and around the world, earning critical acclaim for her unique approach.

En–Knap Group 2.0.

En–Knap Group begins a new chapter – under new artistic direction, at the beginning, with a deconstruction of its own identity. The dance diptych is the first project by Mattia Cason in his role as the ensemble’s new artistic director. In collaboration with the two choreographers, the group chooses instability and in it, the possibility for reality to appear once again in all its contradictory nature – in the body, in dance. It is precisely in this crack, when the dancers become more themselves than ever before, that the true crescendo of identity begins.