Luminato/Compagnie Hervé KOUBI: What the Day Owes to the Night. Hervé Koubi, choreographer, company dancers. June 19 to 21, 2025 (seen June 20) Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto.
The audience in the full (or very near full) house for the Friday performance of Compagnie Hervé KOUBI’s What the Day Owes to the Night was a diverse crowd that included the usual dance-loving suspects along with, I suspect, a good percentage of dance performance neophytes.
Koubi came out to speak to the crowd before the performance began, outlining his story, and where it intersects with dance. He’d grown up in France, always believing his ancestry lay in that country, until, in his late 20s, he finally pressed his father for answers.
To his surprise, he was shown a picture of his great-great grandfather, an Arab man dressed in Middle Eastern clothing. The family was from Algiers on both sides, his mother a Muslim, and his father Jewish.
As he pointed out, there was a time when Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived together peacefully in North Africa and the Middle East.
His dancers, as he related, now come from throughout the Mediterranean region.
“We have a belonging that is much older than the nations,” he said.
The Dance
The piece begins in darkness, with the dancers as shapes that begin to emerge from the shadows. Their costumes consist of white pants, with a skirt that overlays them. It was a stroke of design genius that allows for both raw physicality and poetic expression, hallmarks of Koubi’s choreography.
Both of those elements were immediately on display. In many ways, the costumes and movements took inspiration from the Sufi dances of North Africa, and at many points in the flow of the piece, various dancers, alone or with others, would spin upside down, either on one hand or on their heads.
Koubi plays with the individual dancers as individuals, duos and trios, groups, and as one ensemble in a flow of movement that often occurred on multiple levels. Sometimes, the group of 12 would come together as one to catch a single dancer who’d been tossed high into the air. Back flips, aerial somersaults, and other acrobatic moves regularly punctuated the piece.
At other points, one dancer would separate from the rest to perform a series of movements, often astonishingly acrobatic, and then land, to stroll off stage again. While obviously precisely timed and executed, they performed gravity defying moves with an air of ease — almost casually.
Koubi’s movement vocabulary comes from contemporary dance, capoeira (the Afro-Brazilian martial art that blends dance and acrobatics), and other sources which blend seamlessly into the ebb and flow of tensions.
The Music
The music provided the impetus, from the gongs and traditional percussion of the opening to contemporary art music to snippets of Baroque counterpoint that flitted in and out of the mix. The range of sounds coincided with the nature of the movements as the dance progressed, rising in tensions with more abstract, avant-garde music, and settling into patterns with music that echoed with Algerian traditions.
Silence divided the different sections of the work.
As with capoeira, there was an element of spirituality that came through the dazzling effect of the sheer athleticism of the piece. There was often a kind of narrative to the different sequences, sometimes with a kind of messianic overtone — as if they were worshipping, or elevating one to a higher state.
Final Thoughts
Spontaneous applause erupted more than once at the feats of acrobatic and athletic prowess, but Koubi has achieved much more than that with What the Day Owes to the Night.
“Don’t really try to understand or know what the choreograph wants, because nobody knows. Only he knows what he wants,” said Koubi’s partner and company co-founder Guillaume Gabriel in a recent interview with LvT.
Without putting too fine a point on it, then, the work artfully conveyed a strong sense of identity in unfettered self expression and the joy of physicality — of the individual, and also of the collective — alongside a sense of communion and coming together. Koubi has fused the various threads of his story into a coherent and moving work.
It’s a compelling work that mixes heritage with modernity to create something new.
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