O2 | FTA

Crédit: Marie Reine Corvellec. In the photo: Cara Roy.

In the heart of the city, O₂ forms a peaceful oasis. The dancers gathered around the choreographer Sarah Dell’Ava weave a screen, filtering out our daily agitations. Using the sky and urban greenery as a theatrical backdrop, they allow time to settle differently, and poetry to emerge.

Brought together over the past several years by a regular practice of movement, this intergenerational community shows remarkable endurance. For six hours, the thirty performers repeat cycles of spontaneous observation and invention. Their gestures and songs arise from deep inside their beings—enigmatic, and at times wild. The treasures they gather within become danced offerings, and later morph into poems, created, written out and shared directly on location. This delicate ritual of gratitude is endlessly renewed, extending into a celebration of the present and begging the question: what if dance could mend the living?