Invited in 2023 by the Festival de Marseille to create a large-scale piece for about a hundred amateur performers, Aina Alegre has conceived PARADES & DÉSOBÉISSANCES, a participatory project inspired by major popular events—celebrations, parades, processions—and ritual gestures drawn from her choreographic research over the past decade. Drawing on her Catalan roots and the collective energy of Mediterranean festivals, she envisions a monumental dance, rooted in rhythm and performed by around a hundred participants.
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Drawing inspiration from these festive rituals, Aina Alegre views the crowd as a fleeting community and a living architecture, imbuing public spaces and heritage sites with a new, vibrant, and celebratory spirit.
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Following Marseille, the choreographer will restage the piece in various settings and cities: in 2024, at the Palais des Sports in Grenoble; in 2025, in Annecy and Lyon, as a procession through public spaces featuring 200 participants, in collaboration with Bonlieu Scène nationale and the Défilé de la Biennale de Lyon. In 2027, the piece will be recreated in Barcelona in collaboration with the Mercat dels Flors and other Barcelona-based partners.
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The number of dancers, the power of the movement and sound, and the interplay between space, architecture, and choreography all contribute to the extraordinary scope of PARADES & DÉSOBÉISSANCES.
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“This piece will be restaged in different contexts and architectural settings, thereby creating new choreographic variations of the same work and fostering a community ofdancers who have shared this experience across multiple cities and countries. What interests me about this project is forming a collective body while embracing all forms of diversity, as well as merging with different architectural heritages, bringing the work into contact with public spaces, in order to give these places, spaces, and heritages a new memory and a new energy through a collective, powerful, and joyful dance.” Aina Alegre