Autothérapie

As part of the Faits d'hiver festival, Autothérapie - Unbolting Colonial Statues from Our Consciousness delves into the history of colonisation, segregation, and slavery.

With this first solo, Mackenzy Bergile leads a choreographic introspection of a 21st-century body, a hybrid body, where the legacies of African diasporas can be read, marked by exile, uprooting, and migrations, and where identity is constantly recomposed.

Between Haiti, Europe, and the United States, from the transatlantic slave trade to the Haitian revolution, he transforms memory into a space of friction, and his body into a geography with porous borders, allowing long-suppressed presences to surface.

Through his gestures, historical figures and episodes emerge, on the verge of representation, like so many ghosts that would stir our present.

The show thus proceeds in fragments, drawing inspiration from Haitian spiralism, a poetic movement that rejected the linear order of history in favour of a narrative progressing through irruptions, shifts, and reminiscences.

The spiral then becomes the motif of a choreography where spinal undulation mutates the Yanvalou – a Haitian Vodou dance – through contact with ballet and jazz.