Sol Invictus - Cie Hervé Koubi

Imaginative contemporary dance and kinetic urban dance meet in this work by the brilliant choreographer whose company was last seen at The Arts Center in What the Day Owes to The Night

In Sol Invictus, a fervent ode to the unifying power of dance in a turbulent world, seventeen male and female dancers operate as a tight-knit collective, emphasizing shared responsibility for each other alongside personal accountability. This luminous ballet mixes hip-hop physicality and classic elevation with aerial style. Through beauty and grace, Koubi declares his love towards dance: to its past, to its present, and to its future. “Sol Invictus, 'the unconquered sun', not only refers to the Roman god of the sun but also to a ritual during the annual Roman Midwinter festival which celebrated the passing of the darkest days, anticipating better, sunnier days ahead. And that celebration, that hope, for me, is precisely what Sol Invictus is all about,” explains Koubi.

With Sol Invictus, Koubi wishes to stage in the flesh, and above all in light, the fact that love is the guarantor of peace, in a world which, despite the outbreak of perpetual war, conceals a force more powerful – that of communion.“I want to talk about light, solidarity, and those bonds that unite us,” says Koubi. “Here, the sun and the dance will emerge victorious.”

The dancers of Compagnie Hervé Koubi spend a lot of time upside down. Inverted, they spin on one or both hands or on their heads, legs spiraling. Upright, they bound into the air, as if off trampolines, ball up their bodies and rapidly rotate in high-flying arcs. They toss one another even higher.

This is all thrilling. But the distinctive aesthetic achievement of this French company is to make those extraordinary acrobatics and hip-hop power moves feel at times pedestrian, almost like walking. What for other dancers might be show-off steps are integrated into a poetic vision, a different way of being.” - The New York Times.

Biography

• Hervé Koubi: Of Algerian roots, Hervé Koubi grew up in France where he studied biology and dance at the University of Aix-en-Provence before graduating as a Pharmaceutical Doctor in 2002. After deciding to concentrate on a dancing career and graduating from the Rosella Hightower School of Dance in Cannes, Koubi gained professional experience as a dancer before creating his first project entitled Le Golem and collaborating with Guillaume Gabriel for all his works and more recently also with Fayçal Hamlat. Since 2010, he has been working with a group of 12 to 14 all male street dancers from North Africa on several works including What the Day Owes to The Night (presented at The Arts Center in two sold out shows in 2023, The Barbarian Nights or The First Dawns of the World, Boys Don’t Cry (October 2018), and ODYSSEY (January 2020).

• More recently, he has been Associate Choreographer at the Pole National Supérieur de Danse in France and has been awarded the French medal of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in July 2015. His company is based mainly in Calais, in Northern France, and keeps strong relationships with Cannes and the region Nouvelle Aquitaine