Les Oiseaux by Lenio Kaklea was shown 21–23 August 2026 at HAU2 in Tanz im August. It’s a dance of composite bodies, navigating choreography as systems: intersecting networks that test coexistence.
Birds have long inspired dance, whether in stage performances like Swan Lake and The Firebird or cultural folk traditions, like the Philippines’ tikling bird dance. Their non-human ability to sustain flight through space, deliver messages between earth and sky, and connect with one another through call and response has stirred movements in human bodies since time immemorial, in dances of resistance, divine connection, and romantic storytelling.
Lenio Kaklea’s Les Oiseaux (2025)seeks not only for its dancers to move like birds, but to offer its choreography as insight into the perspective of birds: a bird’s-eye view. It opens on a sunrise, with light breaking through a Rothko-esque backdrop of warm colours that continually, imperceptibly shift through sky-tone hues. In life, the sky is always above and ahead, an expanding horizon; here, as a vertical plane confronting us, we, the audience, are reoriented in our perception, perhaps also high above the land, immersed in another atmosphere, the way a bird moves through sky space.
The lone figure of Raoul Riva transforms from silhouette to illuminated as he moves through delicate hold-and-thrust patterns, initiated by his shoulder joints, sliding his wing-like scapula across his ribcage, headbobbing, eyes wide and fixed. The specificity of his reactions is captivating, as he sequences through forms and qualities that seem at once reptilian and anti-gravity, perhaps recalling animals of the Jurassic period, of which modern birds are direct descendants: theropod dinosaurs. He performs with flicking accents, like ruffling invisible feathers, though a few real ones trail from the nape of his neck.
Riva is soon joined on stage, incrementally and from different corners, by the rest of the seven-piece cast, all adorned in different colourful, minimally feathery outfits. Their group union coalesces responsive, individual movements into a shared vocabulary and temporality, a formal grammar of modern-dance-like motifs: triplets, side-bends, hops, and spins. They perform in unison, gradually varying, the group splitting into smaller groups, locomotive passages sifting through each other, like gulls that migrate, or schools of fish. Ghosts of Lucinda Childs’ minimalist patterning soar, dip, and glide through the sky-stage ahead.
There’s something majestic and celebratory about these ribbons of colour that flock, wave and weave through each other, and the dancers certainly catch bouts of adrenaline they generate, human smiles breaking across their faces with the sheer pleasure-challenge of sustaining unison steps. Yet these sections, as they zoom out to the wider vista, flatten the uncanniness that embodiments like Riva’s produced. Such preternatural ways of moving, that aren’t exactly an imitation of a bird, but perhaps learning from a bird’s way of being, generate odd, acutely fascinating bodies.
I enjoy the inclusion of the drone toward the work’s end, offering yet another bird’s-eye view, although I don’t understand why we see one of the bird-dancers remotely controlling it. The birds outside my window must contend daily with the robot birds—drones—we increasingly send into their sky, alongside planes crossing overhead, disrupting their songs, migratory paths, and peace.