Van Cleef & Arpels, (La)Horde Dance Outside of the Box

LONDON — Van Cleef & Arpels is not to be taken at face value just for their delicate stones, pretty floral designs and shiny metals.

This week the jewelry brand is taking everyone by surprise by supporting the disruptive French dance collective (La)Horde’s takeover of the Southbank Centre in London until Saturday with a collection of live performances, installations and films in “We Should Have Never Walked on the Moon.”

The performances were done in partnership with 80 dancers, some from the Ballet National de Marseille and Rambert.

Each floor, section and corner of the Southbank Centre has been turned into a walk-in dance performance. Some dancers, robot-like in their gestures, made their way through the floors and participated in different dances taking place, while others repeated the same steps on loop.

Some performances were timed and took place every 30 minutes or hour.

But this wasn’t any typical Van Cleef & Arpels dance number — (La)Horde presented themes of technology, greed and intimacy.

The name of the show, “We Should Have Never Walked on the Moon,” is borrowed from what the Hollywood actor and choreographer said to Buzz Aldrin, who was the second man to walk on the moon after Neil Armstrong.

“Patricia Ward, who is Gene Kelly’s widow, told us that Gene was really appalled by the idea that astronauts walked on the moon because it feels sacred and that people at the same time were not respecting this magnificent satellite,” said a spokesperson for (La)Horde. “We thought that this coming from a dancer’s perspective was very interesting.”

The show was an opportunity for the dance collective to show their range outside of their ballet repertoire and pop shows. They even gave audiences a different perspective by letting them in on the backstage experience.

One of the dance performances is based around the ritual of dancers changing in and out of their costumes.

This was (La)Horde’s second time in London with Van Cleef & Arpels. The dance collective were part of the jewelry brand’s dance festival “Dance Reflections” that took place in the spring.

(La)Horde presented “Age of Content,” drawing on the “internet’s aesthetic facets of distraction, accumulation and collage, and, moving from the strange familiarity of a GTA character to a TikTok dance mash-up, the group uses choreographic art as a tool to give critical distance.”

Coming back to London evokes a strong feeling for the dance group.

“London is a capital of culture and it’s interesting to confront what we do and how we think of dance and contemporary dance to the experience of English viewers. There’s also a feeling of club culture and diasporic traditions that coexist and feed off each other in the city,” said the (La)Horde spokesperson.

Collaboration has been at the heart of (La)Horde and their next act is with the sculptor and stage director Théo Mercier. He will be joining as associate artist and combining “his experimentation around performance landscapes” with the “creations blending exhibition and performance,” according to the dance company.

“We’ve been working alongside him for more than a decade now and we come from the same communities. Théo has this multi aspect of being a stage director and visual artist, where his shows are very ambitious and challenging in terms of production,” the spokesperson said.

Mercier’s project “Skinless” was a standout for (La)Horde. He toured around France, Switzerland and Canada with 80 metric tons of compressed waste from each visiting city and used it as a stage for the performance-only work.

“Théo has a very tender heart, but a strong rebellion within his work,” said the (La)Horde spokesperson.