For more than ten years, choreographer Joanne Leighton has meticulously collected photographs of people gathering together. From celebration to protest to ritual, from one side of the world to another, nearly a thousand images make up this corpus. This atlas of images is the starting point for a new dance work entitled People United, which, after 9000 Steps and Songlines, completes a trilogy of work dedicated to universal, shared movements.

Nine stunning dancers melt into these photos and bring them to flesh in scenes of jubilation, demonstration, carneval, and dance. Joanne Leighton’s movement vocabulary is authentic and raw. The dancers bring to life different people from diverse origins, men, women and children, without ever imitating them. They are inhabited by the memories of sites of the images and framed by the scenography, a perpetual wind, which seems to come from another time.

A layered soundscape composed by Peter Crosbie intertwines the work, featuring brass bands, percussion, celebratory songs and speeches from Martin Luther King to Greta Thunberg.

Through the repetition of images, juxtaposition and layering, the piece is like a moving cartography of visual knowledge, the group seem to bring back ancestral gestures. These movements unite us all and form the basis of our humanity. Tender or provocative, sheltered or exposed, between chaos and immobility, their bodies give rise to a powerful physical language, both familiar and shared.