LA(HORDE) and the Ballet national de Marseille: Choreographing Hyperconnectivity

The French collective LA(HORDE) is returning to Montreal with Age of Content, a choreographic work created with the Ballet national de Marseille, which delves into the heart of our hyperconnected lives.

Morbid doomscrolling, digital avatars, media saturation… the performance explores the impact of screens on our bodies and our ways of living together. Following is an interview with the three founding members of LA(HORDE), Jonathan Debrouwer, Arthur Harel, and Marine Brutti.

How does Age of Content fit into the approach your collective has taken since its beginnings some fifteen years ago?

We explore what digital ecosystems do to bodies: how they standardize, accelerate, and contaminate our gestures, desires, and fears. Age of Content furthers this reasoning. It is a journey through a world where catastrophe is constantly in the public eye, and where bodies nevertheless seek ways to connect, resist, and reinvent themselves.

The show’s structure is inspired by doomscrolling. How is this translated into choreographic language?

The very structure of the piece is conceived in the manner of a feed. The scenes follow one another and are juxtaposed, just like when you scroll: one fragment captures, excites… then the next takes over, without a transition. Choreographically, this translates into collisions of registers, ruptures, reboots. Our final scene, which we’ve called “Tik Tok Jazz,” embodies this doomscrolling in its literal form: a fifteen-minute segment in which the dancers experience a dopamine rush, blending memes and excerpts from viral dances, like in a musical.

The show has been running since 2023; what has the reception been like so far?

It has had a very lively, and sometimes mixed reception. The piece sparks some debate, and we like that. We’re less interested in producing a comfortable object than in creating a space for friction, while remaining deeply rooted in dance.

How did you work with the dancers to get them to embody these moving and unstable figures typical of online avatars?

As part of our creative process, we come to the studio with the themes we want to explore, in the form of materials, images, or texts. We were inspired by movements in hyper-realistic video games, like The Sims or Grand Theft Auto, designed by engineers to replicate human movement. Having the dancers interpret these often-imperfect digital movements, riddled with glitches and bugs, created a real back-and-forth exchange: the contrast between digital alteration and bodily precision profoundly informed our writing and our approach to the piece.

Your first visit to the city was in 2014, for the premiere of the show Avant les gens mouraient in collaboration with the graduating students of the École de danse contemporaine de Montréal. What is your relationship with Montreal?

Our work on Avant les gens mouraient had a profound impact on us. There was a freedom in it, a way of taking possession of the stage that resonates with our desire for a porous form of dance, open to influences and the urgent needs of the present. Since then, we have maintained a close emotional connection with the Montreal scene. It is demanding and inquisitive, it embraces hybrid forms, and it appreciates dance that engages in dialogue with images, music, and popular culture.

Age of Content, by the collective LA(HORDE) and the Ballet national de Marseille, presented by Danse Danse at Théâtre Maisonneuve from February 27 to March 7, 2026.